When Ed Miliband announced his eye-catching energy policy, Tory MPs hoped that their party would respond in kind with something similarly interesting to voters but that would really work. They hoped this would underline that the Conservative party is the party of government, while Miliband was only suitable for opposition. George Osborne’s conference fuel duty freeze and his noises about green taxes and levies on fuel bills reassured many of them, but Sir John Major’s intervention yesterday has highlighted the vacuum caused by a refusal by Number 10 to engage with what one strategist described to me as ‘the footling little things’. One MP said after Major’s speech:
‘Number 10 is totally on the wrong page on this. They needed to have properly responded to Ed Miliband but instead said nothing and now the vacuum is filled by both greedy energy companies and John Major.’
Incidentally, there is a conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Tory party that this intervention was some clever kite-flying from Number 10.
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