Ed Miliband’s aides used to scurry around the parliamentary estate, their shoulders hunched. A look in their eyes suggested that they feared their boss’s harshest critics were right. But times have changed. Now Team Ed marches with heads high. The success of his pledge to freeze energy prices has given them a warm glow.
Five weeks on from the Labour leader’s conference speech, his commitment still dominates political debate. It has boosted his personal ratings, helped his party increase its support in the polls and convinced his supporters that he might be Prime Minister after the next election.
In these circumstances, one might expect the Tories to be panicking. But they’re not. They’re reassured by the fact that their party leads Labour on economic competence and that David Cameron remains comfortably ahead of Miliband on the question of who would be the best Prime Minister. Add to this that the economy is now growing at a robust pace — which will probably increase the Tories’ lead on the economy — and one can see why they are confident. After all, no party has ever won an election trailing, as Labour currently does, on both the question of which party is better for the economy and preferred PM.
How can the Tories lead on the economy and leadership and still trail overall? There are three possible answers. The first is that economic growth doesn’t matter in the way that it used to because, as Miliband said in his conference speech, the ‘vital link between the growing wealth of the country and your family finances [is] broken’. If people don’t think that Britain’s recovery will benefit them, then general economic stewardship will matter less politically. Labour strategists argue that in these circumstances the candidate who can persuade voters to think his party will be better for them and their family will be far more successful than the one who can boast of economic competence.
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