Ed Miliband’s office has complained that no-one told them about Angela Merkel’s visit to London, which takes place tomorrow. They are apparently very irritated about no-one telling them, even though the Foreign Office isn’t required to flag up visits like this anyway. But worse than that, they were given warning: in the newspapers.
Here are the first few paragraphs of a story published by the Times on 27 December, entitled ‘Merkel puts culture and G7 on agenda for visit’:
‘Angela Merkel will make Britain her first overseas visit of the year in a sign of the importance that she attaches to her relationship with David Cameron.
‘The German chancellor, named yesterday as The Times person of the year, will visit London on January 7 as part of a round of preparatory meetings for the G7 summit, which she will host in Bavaria in June.’
The Germans never received a request from Labour for a meeting, and therefore there will be no meeting. Presumably this is because no-one in Labour read the papers on 27 December, or if they did, they didn’t check with the right people that they would be getting a meeting with the German Chancellor. So either Labourites don’t read the papers or they don’t talk to each other. Which one is worse?
What is stranger is that the party now thinks that whinging about not being warned about something that was already in the newspapers is a good look. No-one likes a moaner, particularly not one trying to convince the electorate it is worth backing in May. Miliband claims to be offering a message of ‘hope’, but his party often sports a real hangdog look in public.
There are other silly mistakes that the Miliband team make, too. Why set the stage for a speech without checking that the Labour leader can see the people who were asking questions? Failing to do this yesterday meant photographers snapped pictures like this one below, which made Miliband look as though he was lost at sea.
Failing to check out the venue for his ‘make-or-break’ speech in the autumn meant Labourites left their leader to peer nervously through a window under a sign saying ‘exit’.
They’re just little details, but they are the sort of thing that Liz Sugg, who is in charge of event logistics for Number 10, would never miss when trying to make David Cameron look as prime ministerial as possible. Labour complains that it’s being tripped up by silly little things at the moment when it has a great plan for the country, if only voters could hear about it. Perhaps it needs to start looking out for those silly little obstacles lying in its path, rather than waiting grandly for someone else to helpfully point them out. That’s not really how politics works, is it?
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