By now, Ed Miliband should be feeling upbeat about next week’s Labour party conference. No matter what happens in Liverpool, it can’t be more debasing than the spectacle the Liberal Democrats laid on in Birmingham. The Lib Dems’ decision to insult their coalition partners did nothing to enhance their standing. If the Tories are, as Vince Cable put it, the ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys, why did his party join these villains in government?
Against such juvenile behaviour, the Labour conference will, for the first time in years, look like a convention for grown-ups. All Ed Miliband needs to do is look as if he is leading a government-in-waiting. It is easy to dismiss Miliband. He has struggled to make an impression on the political stage or improve his party’s ratings in the polls. But if Britain tips into another recession — an increasingly likely possibility — the next election is his to lose.
It is easy to forget that Labour is already within striking distance. Miliband has 258 MPs: historically, it is odd for an opposition with so many seats to lose the next election. David Cameron has many skills, but winning elections is not his strong suit. This time last year, the Conservatives imagined that an economic recovery would win them a second term. Now, such talk has vanished. Unemployment is rising again, and the government is relying on artificially cheap debt. Should the cost of borrowing return to normal, as it has in Italy, calamity would ensue.
If the Tory-Lib Dem project is deemed to have failed, to whom can voters turn? Labour now has the monopoly on opposition votes, so has led opinion polls for nine solid months. Jim Murphy, perhaps the last surviving Blairite on the Labour front bench, says on page 14 that the poll lead could be larger.
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