Politics: Ed Miliband has given himself a chance to be heard, but he won’t take it

After the carnival barking of the phone-hacking saga, the long break beckons for Parliament. For the party leaders, though, there will be little rest. Against the advice of their entourages, who after all want a break from their boss, the three leaders will now spend eight weeks worrying about their conference speeches.

In my former life in Labour politics, I would come back after the break to find Tony Blair surrounded by paper on which he had scribbled fragments of ideas. Over several weeks we added lines and moved the papers around. It was like the party game in which several people draw a funny animal. Hours that will never come back were spent searching for the elusive theme that would magically connect childcare tax credits, the balance sheet rationale for PFI and the case against a narrowly realist conception of foreign policy. The sculptor Jacob Epstein, when he was asked how he got such a good likeness of Ernest Bevin, once said that he took a block of marble and simply chipped away all the bits that didn’t look like Ernest Bevin.