Iain Martin: Ed Miliband could become the accidental Prime Minister

Everywhere Miliband goes, his enemies anticipate a stumble. When he went to the United States earlier this week, chasing a few minutes with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, the chatter from journalists on social media sites such as Twitter was of the looming gaffe to come.

In the event, there was no gaffe and Miliband’s team was pleased with the meeting. By any reasonable measure, it went just fine. There were no disasters of the kind that can befall a leader on such a trip.

But this will not compute. At Westminster, Ed Miliband is presented as being forever only one bacon sandwich away from another public-relations disaster, as when he was caught by photographers recently trying and failing to eat a bacon butty. It will be like this, with his enemies focused ruthlessly on a cruel concentration on Miliband’s facial expressions and verbal tics, from now until polling day.

When his opponents are not picking on him personally in the election campaign they will be setting about Labour’s policy platform — such as it is — with a baseball bat. The party is vulnerable to the charge that its only solution to any given problem is increased government spending or “soak the rich” taxes. On health and education, where New Labour once bravely pushed reform, Labour under Miliband seems once again to be in thrall to producer interests such as the trade unions.

As if Miliband did not have enough to worry about, here comes Tony Blair again, supposedly reminding voters what an election-winning Labour leader used to look like. On Monday, the former Prime Minister spoke at an event commemorating his friend the pollster Philip Gould. It was classic Blair and was listened to by an adoring audience of Blairites.

This is despite his record being somewhat mixed. While Blair’s supporters point to assorted, important social reforms, and to the academy programme in schooling, it is also worth considering the madcap expansion of the British banking system. It began under the Conservatives and then accelerated recklessly under Tony Blair and his Chancellor, to whom he subcontracted all matters economic. It meant that the 2008 crisis, after a private borrowing boom, hit the UK harder than other similar countries.

Blair’s ill-conceived constitutional reforms, presented as tidying up, have also got the UK to a position, only 15 years after their introduction, in which the Scottish Nationalists are in power in Edinburgh and Scotland and will soon vote on breaking away.

Of course, what Blair did know how to do brilliantly was project a desire for power and to tell a story about what he wanted to do with it. Sometimes the narrative was later discovered to be full of holes. On other occasions, what he did with the power he was so skilled at acquiring turned out to be dangerous, as when he failed to use the leverage with the Americans he had accumulated in the run-up to the Iraq war. He should have at the very least insisted on proper preparations for the aftermath of the invasion.

Miliband cannot, and should not, copy Blair in every regard. He can no more replicate his predecessor’s electoral insights and marketing wizardry than he can recreate next year the peculiar set of circumstances pertaining in 1997, when there was less contempt for authority and the political process was not scorned as completely as it is now following Iraq, the financial crisis and MPs’ expenses.

There is one lesson Miliband can learn from Blair, however. It is that he must, after his summer holiday, at least try to give a coherent account of why he wants power and what, in simple, practical terms, Labour might do. If it cannot be as polished as Blair, then Miliband might make a virtue of not being slick.

As it is, despite years of policy work by Labour, and endless reports and recommendations, Miliband seems to have nothing remotely memorable or clear-sighted to say to the country.

After almost four years of his leadership it is as though he is not really there. It is as though he hopes to get to No 10 by becoming the accidental Prime Minister.