Ed miliband

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A beautiful speaking voice is a window to the soul

Recent text from a female friend. ‘I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ To which I reply, ‘But of course! Up there with the Dean of Westminster and Frank Gardner.’ The same day, walking in Kensington Gardens, another friend admits, ‘I think I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ We mourn the fact that MacGregor’s Wikipedia entry tells us he’s ‘listed in the Independent’s 2007 list of most influential gay people’, so the director of the British Museum is, sadly, out of reach to womankind. It’s his beautiful speaking voice that does the trick. I like the way, in his Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation, MacGregor pronounces ‘Germany’, with

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Miliband chooses the wrong day to have a good PMQs

Ed Miliband has just managed to have a really good PMQs on a day when there is such a big story following the session that it will barely get reported. The Labour leader focused on broken promises, and cleverly managed to force the Prime Minister to talk about immigration by asking about the failure of the net migration target. David Cameron had planned not to talk about immigration at all, but he then found himself doing just that in the Chamber. Then the Labour leader moved on to the promised ‘no top-down reorganisation’ of the NHS. Then it got personal, with both men scrapping using party mess-ups as their weapons.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Why ‘respect’ is the last thing we should want from politicians

‘Respect!’ cried my husband, drop-kicking a cushion with a picture of the Queen Mother holding a pint of beer on it (a present from Veronica) across the drawing-room. I might as well be married to Russell Brand and be done with it. His little satire was set off by Ed Miliband’s remarks about Emily Thornberry’s notorious Cross of St George tweet. ‘What is going through my mind is respect,’ the Labour leader said. ‘Respect is the basic rule of politics and I’m afraid her tweet conveyed a sense of disrespect.’ This seems to me deranged. If Mr Miliband knew about life ‘down in the street’ he’d realise that ‘respect’ is

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: the barbarism of the Twitter mob

Are we heading for a new barbarism? Is this the return of the 18th-century mob? Here are more questions than answers. I ask because when all the fuss about Emily Thornberry and her photo tweet from Rochester has died down, we shall be left with something more disturbing than whatever sin she may or may not have committed. We’ve just seen demonstrated the speed, the destructiveness, the sheer violence of the modern tempest that information technology can create. In the world of opinion, climate change has arrived already. As a workaday columnist, I reflect that I could equally easily write a spirited defence of Ms Thornberry; or a spirited attack;

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: In sickness and in health

Health, health, health. Viewers of PMQs must be sick of it by now. Health this, health that. Health, health. On and on. Ad nauseam. Today’s exchanges involved the usual tussle over which Superman can save the NHS. Dave and his virile economy or Ed with his honked out assertions that he’s the patient’s champion? The only place where healthcare isn’t massively overstretched is west Africa. Tory Edward Garnier revealed that a spanking new hospital in Sierra Leone, completed with UK money, and run by Save the Children, is currently treating just five patients. So that’s how you hit waiting time targets. Run the place so badly that everyone runs in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

PMQs: Ukip’s presence unnerves both the Tories and Labour

Ed Miliband is determined to talk about the NHS as much as possible at PMQs while David Cameron wants the economy to be Topic A. The result: Miliband asks about the NHS and Cameron replies by saying that you can’t have a strong NHS without a strong economy. At the moment, there is no sign of either side being able to break this PMQs stalemate. listen to ‘PMQs: Leaders battle over the NHS’ on audioBoom With the leaders stuck in a groove, the backbench questions are now where the action is. The SNP’s Pete Wishart previewed one of the SNP’s 2015 lines of attack, warning of a Ukip-UK as the

Monday

Alex Massie

The saga of Ed Miliband and White Van Man reveals a politics based on grievance and cowardice

Say this for the current state of British politics: it keeps finding new lows. A while back I made the mistake of suggesting voters might already have priced-in Ed Miliband’s shortcomings. The leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition might be a doofus but we know that and, if not exactly tickled by the thought, can cope with it. Reader, I think I may have been mistaken about that. Recent events suggest Miliband’s haplessness exists on a higher plane than anyone previously thought possible. One can only assume he secretly doesn’t want to win the next election. This, at any rate, seems the only sensible verdict to reach based upon the

Sunday

James Forsyth

No breathing space for Miliband and Labour

This was meant to be the weekend when Ed Miliband got some ‘breathing space’, a chance to recover after the last torrid few weeks. But his—and his party’s—troubles are still all over the papers today. The Tories defeat in Rochester has not moved the spotlight on to Cameron and his difficulties in the way that Labour hoped it would.   Now, this is largely because of that Tweet. Emily Thornberry has succeed in uniting Miliband critics and loyalists alike in anger at her stupidity. But, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, many of Miliband’s longest standing political allies feel that the Labour machine has grossly mishandled the issue.

Friday

Steerpike

Ed Miliband reveals he ‘feels respect’ whenever he sees a white van

The fallout from Emily Thornberry’s ‘snobbish’ photo of a flag-furnished house in Rochester looks like it still has plenty of gas. The house’s owner, Dan Ware, has travelled to Thornberry’s Islington house today in search of an apology. Thornberry, who resigned from the shadow cabinet yesterday following a furious conversation with Ed Miliband, has said she is ‘more than happy’ to meet Mr Ware. Nonetheless, a quick glance at some of Thornberry’s ‘favourite’ tweets over the last 24 hours suggests she hasn’t exactly repented of her actions: Miliband seems to be reaching full-blown panic mode, as his damage limitation starts to backfire spectacularly. He’s just stated that he ‘feels respect’ whenever he

Thursday

James Forsyth

Emily Thornberry resigns over Rochester Tweet

Emily Thornberry has resigned from the shadow Cabinet for sending a Tweet that appeared to mock a Rochester voter who was flying several St George’s Cross from their window and had a white van parked outside. Thornberry’s resignation follows Miliband aides briefing that the leader was the angriest they’d ever seen him after being told about the tweet. All this shows just how sensitive Labour is to the charge that it is now a party run by a metropolitan elite who have little connection with the party’s traditional working class base. I suspect that if Miliband had not had the last few weeks that he has, Thornberry would have been

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour tries to avoid Commons humiliation over the West Lothian question

MPs are preparing to debate devolution this afternoon, with a motion from Dominic Raab which includes a call for a review of the Barnett formula and a resolution to the West Lothian question. It’s a backbench business debate, so it is not binding on the government, but it is causing trouble for a number of reasons. The first is that Raab has managed to get an impressive sweep of the political spectrum on his list of supporters for the amendment. It includes senior Tories such as 1922 Committee chairman Graham Brady, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve (not someone who often agrees with Raab), and Andrew Mitchell. But it also has

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Labour and Ed Miliband are the ones who are really out of touch

Ironic Tory roars greeted Miliband’s ascent to the vertical at PMQs today. He assumed his habitual spanked puppy look. It’s quite a sight, Ed’s expression of frosty endurance. Part dismay, part weariness, part moral indignation, it makes him look like a nun who’s just discovered her favourite choirboy reading a porn mag. On went the jeering and the cheering, and a change overcame Miliband’s mug. ‘I’ve got a joke for them,’ he remembered. His face softened. His eyes brightened. An experimental smirk stole across his lips. Then it hardened into a grin. And out came the quip. ‘Let’s see if they’re still cheering on Friday.’ Cameron improvised fast. ‘I make

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron and Miliband exchange insults at PMQs

PMQs is in a rut. The exchanges between Cameron and Miliband now descend into the trading of insults even faster than they did before and both sides simply use PMQs as an opportunity to trot out stock lines. Miliband was determined to use today’s exchanges to paint Cameron as a kiss-up, kick-down politician, trying to contrast his opposition to the mansion tax with his support for the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. (It is, though, worth remembering that only one of these policies is actually a tax.) Miliband fumed, ‘If you’ve got big money you’ve got a friend in the Prime Minister. If you don’t, he couldn’t care less.’ Cameron, for his

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Myleene Klass attacks Ed Miliband’s ‘sexy’ mansion tax

Myleene Klass had a bit of a go at Ed Miliband last night when she appeared next to the Labour leader on The Agenda. She was very cross about what she described as a ‘sexy tax that says let’s take from the rich and give it to the poor’, which is of course Labour’s mansion tax. Apart from a rather awkward bit when she started pointing at a glass of water and said ‘you can’t just point at things and tax them!’, Klass has a point about the ‘sexy tax’ (which would be a great Labour theme tune, adapted from Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexy Back’, in which the party could tell

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 November 2014

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote in the Commons, which enraged backbenchers all the more. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, tabled a procedural motion, forcing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to hurry from the Lord Mayor’s banquet in white tie to vote amid angry scenes. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came back from Brussels claiming that Britain would now only have to pay half of a £1.7 billion bill that the European Union had presented; but critics said that he was merely counting a future rebate that Britain was owed in any case. A

Steerpike Steerpike

Labour’s war on the media is working, as activists turn on hacks

Labour’s efforts to demonise the hostile anti-Ed media is working. At the Labour leader’s eighth ‘relaunch’ speech on Thursday at Senate House, every single question from journalists was greeted by boos, hisses and tuts. The Labour leader actually dealt with the smattering of questions about his latest leadership woes rather well, yet the crowd were having none of it. Party members even hissed the polite chap from the BBC, much to the acute embarrassment of Mr Miliband, who was forced to calm his crowd with a ‘come on now, it’s a fair question’. When another hack asked if Ed felt he had made any mistakes as leader, one passionate activist

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband turns down head-to-head debate with Nigel Farage

Earlier today, Ukip leader Nigel Farage sent what appeared to be a typewritten letter to Ed Miliband challenging him to a head-to-head debate. The Labour leader has now used a more modern form of communication to respond. And, funnily enough, it’s a no: .@Nigel_Farage Bring it on. I look forward to a debate with you, @David_Cameron and @Nick_Clegg in the election campaign. — Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) November 13, 2014 Actually what Miliband would dislike far more than an hour fighting Farage on television (which didn’t work out all that well for Nick Clegg when he did it before the European elections), would be any televised debate involving the Green Party, who

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Miliband heads for the exit

One of the things that every political team needs is a Liz Sugg. Sugg works in Downing Street and makes sure that every trip the Prime Minister makes anywhere runs with military precision and doesn’t involve him walking through a door with the word EXIT on it when he’s delivering a make or break speech after serious questions about his leadership, for instance. Who does that for Miliband?

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s make-or-break speech: ‘I’m willing to put up with whatever is thrown at me’

Ed Miliband’s make-or-break speech this morning was fine. That’s fine as in it did the job just fine, rather than that it was a fine speech that his party will reminisce about for many years. The main challenge was for him to not mess up, either by failing to mention the deficit, tripping up on the way to the lectern, or appearing unconvincing. He did mention the deficit, he did deliver the speech from a lectern (albeit in the round, which is a favoured format of his because it looks informal, but that’s not really what he needs at the moment when he’s trying to look formal and prime ministerial),

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour’s two biggest problems—and neither of them is Ed Miliband

The knives are out again for Ed Miliband this morning. But the Labour leader is the least of his party’s problems. Labour has still not come up with answers to the two existential questions facing it, what’s the point of it when there’s no money left to spend and how should it respond to globalisation. I argue in this week’s magazine that until it does, the party will be in a death spiral. The Labour party has always believed in spending money for the common good. Even Tony Blair’s new Clause IV declared, ‘by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.’ Public spending was