Ed miliband

David Cameron knows that the only criticism from other parties of his plans to restrict welfare access for new migrants will be that he isn't being tough enough. Such is the fear on all sides of being accused of repeating what the Prime Minister describes in his FT article as the 'monumental mistake' of the last Labour government that the only option on the table for Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg will be to support the move. It will be interesting to see how Miliband fares at Prime Minister's Questions today. Given Labour has put forward its own 'tough' proposals and given Yvette Cooper went to such lengths to complain that the Immigration Bill wasn't harsh enough, the Labour leader may choose to argue that Cameron isn't going as far as Labour has now proposed.

Seasoned Miliband observers learned relatively little about the Labour leader from his appearance on Radio Four’s ‘Desert Island Disks’ on Sunday. The programme addressed Ed’s biggest weaknesses head on - namely that he is a bit of a nerd who knifed his brother and comes from aristocratic Marxist stock. The music told its own story. David Miliband has fled across the Atlantic; but Édith Piaf has told Ed that he should regret nothing. A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’, coupled with tales of never pulling down at the disco, played up to Ed’s nerdiness. ‘Jerusalem’ was included to mark his ‘lodestar’ father Ralph; a man who ‘loved this country’ seemed a little meretricious though.

The next time you see a Tory minister on television, count how long it is until they say that David Cameron is a leader with a long term plan for this country. This is the Tories’ new message. In a presentation to Cameron’s political Cabinet on Tuesday morning, Lynton Crosby told the ministers present that the Tories would probably lose the election if it was held today or tomorrow. But, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, he stressed that the election was still 16 months away so the Tories had time to turn things round. He emphasised that they should play up that Cameron is a man with a plan and attack Ed Miliband and Labour foir being opportunistic, something that is already showing up in Crosby’s polling.

Six and a half years after Gordon Brown finally badgered Tony Blair out of Downing Street, the relationship between these two men still dominates British politics. Why? Because David Cameron and George Osborne, and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are, in their different ways, doing what they can to prevent history repeating itself. Their relationships are both informed by the Blair-Brown breakdown. Cameron and Osborne have quite deliberately structured their working lives to avoid replicating the tensions within New Labour. The pair shared a set of offices in opposition with their aides sitting in the same room. This was meant to prevent the emergence of two separate, competing power centres. If it had not been for coalition, the pair would have carried this set up into government.

It started as soon as Ed Miliband stood up at PMQs today. ‘Nightmare!’ yelled the Tories. ‘Nightmare!’ They’d been fired up by the first question from Steve Brine, who craftily double-loaded his query. He referenced the Co-op bank and the ‘nightmare email’ in one sentence. Would the PM respond, he asked, ‘to grave concerns about the nightmare unfolding at the Co-operative?’ Cameron pretended to be all serious. He fretted about the regulatory controls and about safeguarding the bank without fleecing the tax-payer. ‘Nightmare!’ goaded the Tories. Ed Balls, seated beside Miliband, flushed puce. Not a natural Trappist, the shadow chancellor is clearly under orders to shut his gob during PMQs.

Foaming at the mouth is rarely a good sign. In dogs, it can indicate nausea, anxiety or (at worst) rabies. But what about in a Leader of the Opposition? Should we be nervous? During an interview with Sky News today, Ed Miliband was visibly frothing at the mouth, while explaining how he has 'embarked on a major reform' of the Labour party. Steerpike would like to suggest two diagnoses. One: that in future, Miliband should delay the post-lunch interview to avoid further frothing. And two: that the Tories can cut back on their campaign to paint Miliband as unprimeministerial. He does the work for them.

It has long been suspected that there are tensions between Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The pair fell out badly over the third runway at Heathrow in government and when Miliband was elected leader, he conspicuously didn’t offer Balls the job of shadow Chancellor. But since Balls became shadow Chancellor the pair has largely succeeded in keeping their differences under wraps. But the leaked emails revealed by Simon Walters in the Mail on Sunday today, show what Miliband’s team privately thinks of Balls. Torsten Bell, one of Miliband’s most influential aides, calls Balls a ‘nightmare’ and complains about how complicated his message on the economy is. Tellingly, he isn’t rebuked for his tone by the other Miliband advisers on the email.

Nick Clegg’s blast at Labour today is just the opening salvo of a Lib Dem offensive against Labour on the economy. It is another reminder that coalition unity is strongest on the economy. Clegg’s jibe ‘Do you know why Ed Miliband suddenly wants to talk about the cost of living? Because they’ve lost the bigger economic argument’ could easily have been said by Cameron. While his argument that ‘healthy household budgets flow directly from a healthy economy. The two go hand in hand’ echoed George Osborne’s response to the GDP figures. At the top of the coalition, they are immensely frustrated that Labour has managed to change the conversation from the economy to energy prices.

The Sunday Sport, that esteemed paper of record, has replied to Ed Miliband in the matter of Ralph Miliband killing a kitten with a bicycle during WW2, which Miliband described while accepting one of our Parliamentarian of the Year awards last week. The paper says: ‘A WIDOW whose beloved pet kitten was KILLED by the Marxist Dad of Ed Miliband is demanding a face-to-face meeting with the Labour leader. Last month we revealed how the late academic Ralph Miliband ran over Eunice Clark’s  pet Winston while drunkenly riding his bicycle in 1944. Eunice, now 78, was only nine then - but time has failed to ease the upset of losing her cat, which she’d received only weeks before as a Christmas present.

Ed Miliband's energy freeze pledge won him 'political speech of the year' but has had the unintended (yet inevitable) consequence of throwing the energy market into a spasm. The head of Npower, Paul Massara, has said that the political uncertainty means we may not have enough power to cover demand. He has told BBC Hardtalk:- 'The amount of spare capacity to meet the peak requirement has dropped from somewhere around 15 per cent to five... and unless the UK can create a politically stable environment to attract new capital, that capital will not come in... The more government creates uncertainty with things like price freezes or other changes, it means there's less certainty and less likely for capital investment.

Ed Miliband stole the show at this year's Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. The Labour leader, who won a new prize called Political Speech of the Year (for the energy freeze pledge, which ‘transformed his fortunes’), took the chance to read out a Sunday Sport story which accused his ‘Belgian communist’ father of ‘killing a cat’ when cycling through the British countryside during the war. Ed charmed the crowd by being funny, good on camera and, you know, normal. Home Secretary Theresa May, who took the Politician of the Year award, despite her recent burka-related difficulties, was a hoot.

PMQs today was a typically bad tempered affair. The Tories have responded to David Cameron’s mauling two weeks ago, by upping the aggression in Cameron’s answers and the noise levels. Today, the Tories wanted to talk about Unite. At every opportunity, Cameron sought to bring Unite the union, who donate millions to Labour, into his answers. He floated the prospect of new laws to combat the aggressive and unpleasant ‘leverage’ tactics that Unite had used at Grangemouth. He likened Ed Miliband to the mayor of a Sicilian town who had been put in by the mafia and was afraid they would take him out if he took them on. Miliband led on the NHS. But the exchanges were far from enlightening.