What will Miliband do now?

The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been determined not to define himself by picking fights against his own side. He didn’t want to do a Blair or a Cameron and triangulate his way to power. Rather, his model was, in one respect, Thatcher. His team were struck by how she managed to move the political centre from opposition.

But Miliband now finds his own side picking fights against him. As Pete blogged earlier, Unite’s Len McCluskey has launched an intemperate attack on him in The Guardian. McCluskey claims that Miliband’s recognition that Labour’s starting point has to be that the cuts will be reality by 2015 has ‘undermined his leadership’. He even suggests that Miliband has now put himself in danger of being ousted by the bogey-men Blairites.

The question now is how does Miliband react to this intervention? Does he take this opportunity to move into triangulation mode? So far, the noises coming out of his office are relatively conciliatory — they are, as Nick Robinson said just now on the Today Programme, stressing that McCluskey has misunderstood the policy.