Where Red Ed goes, the Tories will follow

That wrenching sound you can hear is the noise of the Tory columnists slamming their gears into reverse. Until yesterday, they had assured their readers that Ed Miliband was a useless, limp-wristed bleeding heart without the machismo to hack it as prime minister. He was weak. He was hopeless. He was toast. But that was then. This morning conservative journalists have been issuing their versions of “Ed Miliband: An apology” – as Private Eye likes to say.

Far from being a whey-faced wonk, he is now a red-in-tooth-and-claw, “socialist” (Toby Young in the Telegraph). Far from being a wimp, he is a terrifying “demagogue [who] wants to fuel tensions and the politics of envy” (Allister Heath, City AM) Far from being a loser, he could reach Downing Street (Max Hasting, the Mail) And so on, and on and on.

Not one Tory paper stops to ask where, for instance, Miliband might have got his idea that developers should face escalating fines to make them release land with permission for building – on pain of confiscation if they did not.