I think Jules gets it wrong in his analysis of the options facing David Miliband. Jules writes:
If he doesn’t make an outright challenge for the leadership now, he will look like he has bottled it, twice, and will begin to look like the Michael Portillo of the Labour Party. If he does challenge Brown and lose, he will look like a loser. If he wins, he will most probably lose the election against Cameron, and will look like a loser. And, least likely scenario of all, if he wins the election against Cameron, he will still have to rule the country with a screwed up economy and a disgruntled electorate grown tired of Labour.
He should have let Brown lose, let the Tories win, let the Tories wallow in recession, let Labour re-group and himself assert his authority over the party in opposition, before coming back to beat the PR toff PM, who will very likely underperform when in power.
As I argued in my post on disruptive politics, the problem is in Jules’s seductively simple prescription that, after an election defeat, Miliband should “let Labour re-group and himself assert his authority over the party in opposition.”
That’s very unlikely to happen – even with a failing economy as the albatross around David Cameron’s neck. In opposition, demoralised by electoral humiliation, and with many of its most talented figures without seats, the Labour Party is almost certain to tear itself apart (with the media fuelling the frenzy).
That’s why Miliband’s best hope (from a self-interested point of view) is to take over now, head quickly for an election, and use his honeymoon bounce to try and turn a disastrous loss into the kind of battling one that the British love.
Momentum is everything in politics. If Miliband’s Labour were to lose the election on the up, then Cameron would take over as PM already looking rattled. In opposition, Miliband could focus his troops on a counter-attack – encouraging the media to sniff Tory not Labour blood.
Take over after a monumental landslide, in contrast, and the psychological damage would already have been done. Labour will spend years portrayed as hapless losers – remember how long it took the Conservatives to escape from this trap.
Miliband would not longer be a prospective Prime Minister. He’d be William Hague, starting a painful period of rebuilding that will benefit the next leader, or the next but one. Then his best hope would be ending up as Foreign Secretary again – in nine or ten years’ time.
