Ed miliband

Moments of grumpiness aside, Ed Miliband's fightback speech this afternoon was very worth listening to.

For more than year Westminster has assumed that David Cameron would have a Tory crisis to deal with after the European Elections. Whenever anyone remarked on the Tories unifying, someone would say ‘well, wait until after the Euros’. The conventional wisdom was that the Tories coming third would lead to a slew of senior Tories pushing for more robust policies on immigration and Europe and more and more Tory MPs calling for a pact with Ukip. But this morning, Cameron has fewer problems than either Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg. The fact that the Tory party has responded so calmly to coming third in a nationwide election for the first time in its history is partly a triumph of expectation management.

We now have both the BBC's projected national vote share and Sky's Westminster projection of what this result would mean in parliamentary seats. Both show Labour ahead but not by much. They are on 31 percent of the vote to the Tories' 29 according to the BBC. While Sky's parliamentary projection has Labour a handful of seats short of a majority. With a year to go, and with the economy expected to grow strongly, in the next 12 months, this is not a comfortable place for Labour to be. There's a reason why more Labour MPs than Tory ones have been taking to the airways to sound off about their party's direction. Of course, Labour still has big structural things in its favour. The boundaries give them an advantage and the left-wing Liberal Democrat vote has collapsed.

Most of the reshuffle-related excitement in Westminster is focused on a pending Tory one. But does Ed Miliband's top team need a bit of freshening up too? I blogged last week that Labour backbenchers, including a number with serious experience of government, were unhappy with the way many of the Labour top dogs are failing to go out to bat for their leader. Miliband has certainly trodden on his stumps in the past few days with some broadcast gaffes, but he does have a problem with the batting order below him.

Ed Miliband seems to have clambered out of the wrong side of bed this morning. The Labour leader has been touring the TV and radio studios, where his answers have become progressively worse as the day went on. First up, Miliband spoke to Good Morning Britain about the 'cost-of-living crisis'. When asked whether he knew how much the average weekly household grocery bill was, he said ‘it depends on how much you are spending and how big your family is’. Then when questioned on how much the Miliband household spends, he said: ‘We probably spend £70-80 on groceries at least, probably more than that.

Mainstream politicians, never known for giving a straight answer, have been giving particularly wibbly and unclear responses to one particular question today. Is Nigel Farage a racist and was what he said about Romanians moving in next door racist? Ed Miliband did pick a particularly tortured definition of what Nigel Farage had said when asked about it on the Today programme. It was a 'racial slur' but Farage is not a racist, or at least, Miliband didn't want to make politics more 'disagreeable' by accusing Farage of being a racist. But he did say that Farage was right to apologise. Helpfully, Nick Griffin pitched in to tell BBC News that Farage wasn't racist, presumably on the basis that it takes one to know one.

The polls are all over the place this morning. Ukip is either on course for a thumping victory, going to be edged into second by Labour or has fallen into third place depending on which is your preferred pollster. But all three Westminster parties are operating on the assumption that Ukip will win, as I say in the Mail on Sunday. Certainly, Labour are getting their excuses in early. Those close to Miliband are quick to point out that Tony Blair never won a European Election and that the party machine will be concentrating more on Thursday’s council contests than the European Elections as having a strong council base will matter more in 2015 than who has the most MPs.

David Axelrod has parachuted into London to give Ed Miliband a ‘makeover’. Miliband needs all the foundation and blusher he can get; but a trip to the battleground in Newark might have been a more productive starting point for Axelrod: Labour’s greatest problem is its strategy, or lack of one. Newark has huge significance for the Tories – a chance to recover from their likely drubbing at the local and European elections, an opportunity to put Ukip to the sword and a way to build momentum towards next year’s general election. The party is well organised on the ground. A strong base of activists and councillors is operating out of five local campaign offices.

Today's PMQs was never going to be easy for Ed Miliband. The latest polls have put a spring in the Tories' step and made Labour MPs jittery. And today's job numbers — with employment hitting record levels — gave Cameron the perfect springboard from which to argue that the government's economic plan is working. But, given all this, Miliband did relatively well. The Labour leader went on Pfizer again, attacking its planned take-over of Astra-Zeneca. The issue suits Miliband as it allows him to make his big argument that the Thatcher/Blair consensus kept politicians and the markets too far apart. By contrast, Cameron is constrained in what he can say on the matter.

What will the Labour fallout, if any, from today's polls, be? Generally when this sort of bad news befalls to the Conservative party, the gossip turns quickly to David Cameron's standing as leader. But in the Labour case, it's a bit more complicated. This is partly because the party tends to feel far more loyal to Miliband than Conservative MPs do. They feel as though he tends to invest in them personally - even those who didn't support his leadership or are unhappy with his policies. And so they're less likely to turn on him. The knives have already been out for Douglas Alexander for some time, with shadow cabinet members talking more and more about their frustration with key aspects of the party's campaign for the European elections and for the general election.

Labour is failing to make up any ground on Ukip ahead of next week’s European elections. A new poll from Sky News and YouGov today says that Labour’s support has dropped to 25 per cent, while Ukip remain comfortably in first place with 31 per cent of the vote: [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/LbUDH/index.html"] Interestingly, Ukip has not pushed further ahead since the last YouGov poll I wrote up, but they are now clear of the margin of error — two/three per cent depending on the sample size. It appears that, combined with Ukip's higher likeliness to vote, Labour is ever more certain to come second on 22 May. The Tories, who have long accepted they will come third, will be pleased they are slowly eroding Labour’s vote share.

David Axelrod jets into London this week for the first time since signing up to help Labour in 2015. Axelrod, who friends admit is no expert on UK politics, will have two days to try and get his head round the shape of the next election campaign. This trip will mark the first time that Axelrod and Miliband have met face to face. Up to now, they have only spoken on the telephone. Axelrod will also address a specially convened meeting of the shadow Cabinet. There’s no doubt that having the man who helped Obama get to the White House in town will be a boost to Labour morale. But the scale of the task facing Axelrod is demonstrated by the events of the last week.

Miliband has also been busy ‘looking at options’ for renationalising Britain’s railways at the end of current franchise contracts. This is yet another of what I have called Labour’s ‘targeted tweets’ designed to please trade unions and pick off loose voters — in this case disgruntled south–eastern commuters. What it’s not is a credible, costed policy. Even Ed Balls is said to be distancing himself from such a retrograde idea, while Martin Griffiths, chief executive of the Stagecoach transport group, rightly called it ‘a one-way ticket to higher taxes’ and others in the industry point out that there could be no quicker way to kill existing plans for investment in better trains.