Ed miliband

Ed Miliband has had three launches in three months – but, much as I hate to admit it, things are getting better for him. His party are now consistently ahead in the polls, so in my News of the World column today I look at what’s going right. Here are my main points: 1) Cameron’s embrace has, alas, proved toxic for the Lib Dems. I have been impressed by Nick Clegg since he entered government. I’d like to see him rewarded for the tough decisions he took, and in more ways than being named ‘politician of the year’ by the Threadneedle/Spectator awards. But it just isn’t happening. The ‘merger’ model of coalition that they have chosen (as opposed to the Holyrood model used in Scotland in 1999-07) has robbed them of their identity.

Did he get cold feet? Or was his new spin-team overenthusiastic in their pre-briefing? We were told we'd get an apology from Ed Miliband in today's speech, but instead he entrenched himself in his position that Labour did nothing wrong on the deficit. I'm surprised at this decision. Surely Ed Miliband understands, as his Shadow Chancellor understands, the central importance to an opposition party of economic credibility. That credibility will not return while Miliband bases his economic argument on a denial of the facts. First, and critically, he argues that Britain's deficit was not a problem going into the crisis. Not only is this disputed by an impressive array of domestic and international experts, from Tony Blair to the European Commission and Mervyn King.

The Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election now raises the distinct possibility that Labour could win the next election by default. People on the left have been wondering for some time what could unite the multiple and often contradictory tribes of the Labour Party and it looks like “Tory cuts” and “Lib-Dem broken promises” could do the trick. Simple, crude, disingenuous – perfect. Krishnan Guru-Murthy is half-right when he tweets “paradoxically, real danger may be for Labour...if they conclude they are 'back in the game' already”. Collectively (and morally) this is true. But the bizarre situation we find ourselves in is that the electorate remains unconvinced by Ed Miliband and yet his party is trouncing the coalition in the polls.

Much of Ed Miliband's Grand Confession on the economy is wearily familiar. I mean, we've known his take on the deficit for some time: that the drop in tax receipts from a crumbling financial sector was to blame, rather than Brown's spending. And to have him argue that Labour should have made the economy less dependent on the City is just another way of saying exactly the same thing. But there is something new in there, too. Miliband is set to admit that Labour didn't "talk the language of cuts" soon enough. Not that he's saying Labour should have – or still should – cut deeper and faster, mind. It's simply that Brown and his ministers didn't breath the c-word early enough.

After David Chaytor's conviction last week, the dominoes just keep on tumbling. Today, it was Eric Illsley's turn to confess to his expenses-related sins – and he did so by pleading guilty to three "false accounting" charges in Southwark Crown Court. Given that he's still MP for Barnsley Central – although now as an independent, rather than the Labour MP he was elected as – that makes him the first sitting parliamentarian to face sentencing as a receipt offender. A dubious accolade, to be sure. In terms of day-to-day politics, the next question is whether Illsley will be able to hang on to his seat. He could, theoretically, remain in place if his sentence is under a year's jail time.

Ed Miliband's press conference today was a classic example of clever opposition politics. He and Alan Johnson said that Labour would continue the bonus tax on the banks for one more year. This policy has the twin advantage of maximising the coalition's discomfort over the whole issue of bankers' bonuses and expiring well before the next election. The rest of Miliband's press conference was devoted to an attempt to defend the record of the previous Labour government. Miliband kept making the valid point that in the years before the crash Cameron and Osborne weren't saying that Labour was spending too much but were instead committed to matching Labour's spending plans.

The same, but completely different. That's the electoral paradox that emerges from a couple of opinion polls on the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election this morning. The same, because both the Lord Ashcroft survey for the Sunday Telegraph and the ICM survey for the Mail on Sunday produce the same result as in the general election: Labour first, the Lib Dems second and the Tories in third. Completely different, because this is no longer the achingly close contest that it was back in May. Both polls have Labour soaring 17 percentage points above the yellow bird of liberty. Of course, the polls aren't always right. Yet these latest will surely furrow some brows in Coalitionville.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but David Cameron interviews better in print than he does on screen. He’s almost too polished on television. His supreme confidence and tendency to guffaw at his scripted jokes can grate. But in print his assurance has an affable, human quality. The Daily Mail has interviewed him today. Most of the piece is a lifestyle feature – Dave at home attending to Florence’s evening feed as he watches Newsnight. It is vacuous fare, but it strikes a brilliant contrast with Ed Miliband’s rout at the hands of the nation’s housewives on the Jeremy Vine Show, where there were echoes of Gordon Brown’s excruciating unease with the world beyond Westminster.

Neal Lawson¹s Comment is Free blog-post/essay/manifesto on the 'good society' is causing a flurry of interest in Labour circles. The head of Labour leftish pressure group Compass has been banging on about this for four years now. Borrowed ultimately from Aristotle, this re-heated utopianism is a tempting route for post-socialists tired of the compromises of the Blair years. Neal Lawson is a passionate man, who can claim with some justification to have been developing Labour¹s version of the 'big society' for some time. Here is Neal at his emotional, tub-thumping best: 'To take back some semblance of control, we can't start from a position of trying to humanise a turbo-consumer society whose every premise, process and principle is about not being human.

The Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election is fast shaping up to be the event that will set the tone for the first quarter of the political year. The unique circumstances in which the vote was called makes it particularly hard to predict, no one is quite sure whether there’ll be a backlash against Woolas or one against the Lib Dems for going to court to overturn the result. As I say in the magazine tomorrow, if the Lib Dems were to win, it would give Clegg the breathing space he so needs at the moment. Lib Dem worries about what the coalition is doing to them politically would subside, temporarily at least, and Ed Miliband would find himself under pressure.