Ed miliband

After last week’s PMQs, Ed Miliband needed a clear win today—and he got one. Cameron, who had admittedly just flown back from Afghanistan, didn’t seem on top of the whole tuition fees debate and kept using lines that invited Labour to ridicule the Lib Dems. When Cameron tried to put Miliband down with the line, ‘he sounds like a student politician—and that’s all he’ll ever be’, Miliband shot back that “I was a student politician but I wasn't hanging around with people who were throwing bread rolls and wrecking restaurants." It was a good line and threw Cameron off for the final exchange.   The rest of the session was not a cracker.

Today's Guardian calls it his first interview since leaving office, although I think the Independent beat them to that one back in July. But, in any case, Gordon Brown's chat with Larry Elliot is another staging post on his slow path back to public life. Here's my quick summary: 1) Sniping from the moral high ground. A bit late now, but Brown is making a desperate scramble for the moral high ground. Not for him, he says, scurrilous memoirs that sift through the "arguments" of the past. No, he's got far more important things on his mind than muck-raking and innuendo, like the future of financial regulation across the world. Or has he? It's hard not to see barbs mixed in amongst it all. Take this line from the interview: "I am a full-time MP, not a businessman.

Phil Woolas has lost his appeal against the election court declaring his victory in Oldham East and Saddleworth. As I understand it, Woolas has not exhausted his legal options and could take the whole matter to judicial review. Word is that no decision will be made on a by-election until it is known whether or not Woolas will appeal.   Interestingly, Woolas was accompanied to court today by John Healey, the shadow Health minister. Healey is extremely popular with his Labour colleagues, he came second in the shadow Cabinet elections, and his decision to stand by Woolas today is a sign of where the emotional energy in the Parliamentary Labour Party is on this issue.

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit.

Ed Miliband has made an inauspicious start to his second political relaunch of the week. The Sun has dubbed him Buzz Lightweight, after he adopted the Pixar-inspired catchphrase ‘Beyond New Labour’ to describe his vision for the party. Miliband’s media presence is already wooden; migrating to plastic is hardly a promotion. Miliband and his elders have arrived at Labour’s national policy forum. In so far as it’s possible to determine what he stands for, Miliband is not aiming for the middle ground of British politics, as David Cameron and Tony Blair did. But he is courting the ‘squeezed middle’ with the promise of change. So far, that promise is more vacuous than profound – the new boss looks like the old boss.

There is talk of Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’, but no indication of what it stands for. It has no clear views on the economy, student finance, defence and electoral reform. Despite his party’s lead in the polls, Ed Miliband is an inert political entity (and it did not help him that the party peaked in his absence). Tim Montgomerie has rightly diagnosed a leadership vacuum. Miliband is timid before a parliamentary party that did not select him, and is struggling to acclimatise to a political discourse that the coalition government is moving beyond the terse liturgy of left and right. So far, Miliband's banal default tactic has been to seek consensus.