15 January 2012

Ed Miliband Episode 1: The Bantam Menace

(episode 1 in a series of "Star Warped" Ed Miliband posts)

Part of the fun with the recent gaggle of "Ed Miliband is under attack" media stories is how lame the hacks writing this shit are. If you have a look at them, what have you got?

  • Dan Hodges: ex-New Statesman blogger, dropped by that august outlet for repeated hysterical and incoherent attacks on Ed during Labour Party Conference. Now part of the gang of right-wing payroll bloggers at the Daily Telegraph.
  • John Rentoul: Independent columnist, Blairite among Blairites. One of these guys who think you can stick a red rosette on any Tory nonsense and it suddenly becomes a sensible Labour position.
  • Wintour and Watt: the Guardian's "dynamic duo" of political lobbyists. Specialise in lazy rewrites of any statement made by anyone you've ever heard of in the Labour Party (and many you haven't) so that they look like attacks on Ed.
  • The brain-dead politics hacks at the BBC (particularly Nick Robinson) who take orders from Tory HQ, on pain of the BBC losing even more funding than the 16% it's already being cut (in nominal terms) over the next 5 years.
  • whoever it was at the Sunday Times who thought it would be a good to run a poll on whether Ed Miliband is too ugly to be PM.
It's a good job for Ed that the people writing his political obituary week after week are so lightweight.

What's more, the potential challengers in the Labour party for the leadership are chicken. If no-one was prepared to get rid of Gordon Brown when Labour were 15 points behind the Tories, what's the betting that anyone will get rid of Ed Miliband when Labour is ahead, or at least level pegging, in most polls? As has often been pointed out, historically Labour is much more crap at getting rid of leaders in mid-term than the Tories are. Even poor old Michael Foot was allowed to soldier on until the 1983 election.

That's why I call the plotters against Ed The Bantam Menace.

Stay tuned for more in this ongoing series.

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