Labour party

What do you say when asked what life experience you have as a politician? Probably not ‘I was an economic adviser in the Treasury’ and ‘I taught at Harvard’. But to be fair to Miliband, his answer to one of the trickiest questions levelled at him this morning on Sky wasn’t much different to the one the other party leaders would give, which is essentially ‘not much’. A political Four Yorkshiremen skit wouldn’t be particularly competitive.

With the opinion polls so tight at the moment, we’re having to look for other ways to try and work out what the general election result will be. One indicator worth watching is which party is spending more time thinking about the leadership contest that would follow an election. Now, there has been plenty of speculation about this on both the Tory and Labour benches in recent times. But in the last few weeks, I’ve picked up more of it from the Labour side. One Labour frontbencher calculates that the focus of ‘half the party is on what happens next’.

The papers are full of Blairite warnings to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham about the way Labour is campaigning on the NHS at present. Alan Milburn’s World at One interview gets a great deal of coverage, and just to twist the knife a bit further, the former Cabinet minister joins John Hutton to write in the FT that ‘if Labour is to win in May, the two Eds need to set the record straight and reclaim ground foolishly bequeathed to their opponents’.

Today marks 100 days till the election — so how is the race looking? Still very close, according to the most recent opinion polls. In three polls released over the last 24 hours, the Tories are ahead by one point — according to YouGov, Survation and ComRes (notably, the first time they’ve put the Tories ahead since 2011). Only Lord Ashcroft has the Tories level pegging with Labour. As the chart above shows, the two main parties are neck and neck. The Tories will be hoping these small leads will grow over the next few weeks while Labour will be pleased their opponents have yet to gain much traction.

So the broadcasters have done what many thought they’d be too afraid to do and have threatened to empty chair David Cameron - or anyone else who refuses to take part - in the TV debates. In a statement released this afternoon, BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 said ‘in the event that any of the invited party leaders decline to participate, debates will take place with the party leaders who accept the invitation’. They have also said the debates will all take place within the short campaign, which Cameron didn’t want either. Labour has said it will sign up to the debates, while others continue to grumble. But naturally David Cameron has said very little.

Liz Kendall is a real rising star in the Labour party. Few colleagues have a bad word to say about her, and indeed many have a great deal of good words. Tonight the House magazine publishes an interview with the Shadow Health Minister that contains a number of rather strong comments that she’s made about the party that she has a good chance of one day leading. The line that’ll get most attention is this: ‘You can’t be the moaning man in the pub. Actually the moaning man in the pub often has a real point underneath it all. But mostly you end up not listening.

With 105 days to go until the General Election, politicians of all sides will be slugging it out between now and 7 May. The starting gun has been fired and the policy battles have begun. Unfortunately, we are starting to hear a lot of misinformation from the Opposition. When the Labour Party continually talk down the UK’s employment opportunities, it has a negative impact on the confidence of jobseekers across the UK.  On a day when we have seen a new set of milestones - the unemployment rate falling to a six year low of 5.8 per cent, jobs vacancies at a 14-year record high, 30.8 million people in work and a further fall in unemployment - it’s important to get the facts straight.

Lord Mandelson likes to think he knows a thing or two about Labour winning elections. So it’s odd that the man so keen on message discipline should start sticking his oar into the debate about Labour’s policies with just weeks to go before the General Election. Is it that the Labour peer doesn’t think Labour will win and so was throwing caution to the wind by popping up on Newsnight to call the Mansion Tax crude and say the Lib Dems had a better-designed policy? To make matters more bizarre, he found himself being congratulated by Diane Abbott of all people, with the leftwing hopeful for Labour’s mayoral candidacy saying ‘Lord Mandelson is on to something: it will be problematic in London’.

Chuka Umunna’s fit of pique at the end of his Sky interview was unnecessary. One of the skills of a politician who fancies being a leader is to look calm and reasonable in the face of unreasonable questions. But to be fair to Labour's Shadow Business Secretary, there is nothing wrong with refusing to comment on something you don’t know enough about. There’s something very off-putting and insincere about a politician who blags their way through an interview or panel session like an English student pontificating their way through a seminar on a book they never bothered to read. He could have read those detailed media briefings that Labour sends out every day, but I know very few Labour MPs who read them all as they are just so detailed.

Ubiquitous Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has had to admit that he 'spent' £25,000 in a disastrous and embarrassing threat to sue his counterpart Jeremy Hunt. Burnham has had to declare donations in kind of £16,665 worth of legal services offered by Steel & Shamash, the Labour Party's solicitors, and £8,250 from Gavin Millar QC, a barrister who specialises in defamation proceedings. Students of North London Labour Kremlinology will be aware that Millar is the brother of Fiona Millar, the left-wing agitator and partner of Alastair Campbell. He was last seen taking down Tory MP Andrew Mitchell in the High Court.

Before the eurozone crisis, Greek elections didn’t receive much attention in Westminster. At the moment, however, the polls from Athens are being studied by every politico from the Prime Minister down. How Greece votes on the 25 January could determine the result of our election. If anti-austerity Syriza triumphs, the eurozone crisis will move from a chronic phase into another acute one. For the second election in a row, the backdrop to a British poll and possible coalition negotiation would be talk of debt defaults and bank runs, as Athens struggles with the eurozone straitjacket. Syriza does not want Greece to leave the euro. But it does want the ‘fiscal waterboarding’ to stop, as its leader Alexis Tsipras puts it.