Ed Miliband’s problem isn’t his image. It’s us

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_26_June_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss whether Labour should let Miliband be Miliband” startat=934]

Listen

[/audioplayer]That bacon bap earlier this month was not the cause of Ed Miliband’s unpopularity. Ed Miliband’s unpopularity was the cause of the bacon bap. Scant comfort this will give the Labour leader and his fabled ‘advisers’, but they can stop worrying about food-related photographic gaffes because once the world is out to get you, the world will get you, and if they don’t get you one way they’ll get you another. Sooner or later Mr Miliband will have to eat, and sooner or later a shutter will click as he opens his mouth.

In peacetime politics, most attack is the consequence not of an opening for attack, but of a desire to attack. Intelligent commentary does not dwell on the opportunity but asks the reasons for the desire.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The glamour and grit of J.K. Rowling

I pick up my newspaper and read: ‘Nick Clegg is “toxic” on the doorstep, a Lib Dem peer told the BBC’s Sunday Politics.’ No. The Liberal Democrat party is toxic on the doorstep and Nick Clegg is the leader of the Liberal Democrat party. Do you honestly think that— oh, Ed Davey, say, or Simon Hughes or Tim Farron — would now be the flavour of the decade if for the past four years they had led their party in an alliance with its former foes and broken their election promises as a result?

Ed Davey we’d be calling ‘Ed Who?’ and describing as the ultimate flavourless bore, photographing him in the dreariest poses we could find. Simon Hughes would only have to mount a bicycle to be captioned as a hapless young curate calling in for tea. And woe betide Tim Farron should he ever draw a raffle and grin: we’d chortle that the lightweight young hopeful was auditioning to be a presenter’s sidekick on a regional daytime TV gameshow.