Labour party

When a Labour press release landed in my inbox saying, ‘Ministers must come clean over attempt to bury bad news on strike day,’ I was expecting quite a story. But the reality of it turns out to be rather underwhelming. Labour’s accusation centers round a shift in direction on charging points for electric cars, not exactly a subject that I would expect to keep the government’s communications director Craig Oliver up at night. Ironically, the Department of Transport did publish a press release on the story yesterday and it even attempted to set up a newspaper interview to trail the announcement but this effort failed as the story wasn’t deemed exciting enough.

Ed Miliband is learning. He has written a blog on Thursday’s strikes and it is plain that he has learnt from the errors he made during the March against the Cuts by associating himself with militancy. First, he places himself firmly on the side of parents who will be inconvenienced by Thursday’s strikes: “The Labour Party I lead will always be the party of the parent trying to get their children to school, the mother and father who know the value of a day’s education.” Miliband gives the unions and their members pretty short-shrift to be honest. He writes: “I understand why teachers are so angry with the government.

It’s odd how political leaders often address their parties in the clichéd terms of soap operas’ most tortured romances. Ed Miliband pre-trailed speech to the Labour’s National Policy Forum in Wrexham is replete with protestations of having grown apart and the need to listen and be more open with each other. “We cannot continue as we are,” he implores. But there is some substance to Miliband’s rhetoric of reconnection. He has already announced his intention to appoint his own shadow cabinet, which caused some consternation among Labour’s more reactionary elements.

Ed Miliband is to abolish shadow cabinet elections. Tony Blair, fearful of the reaction of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), shied away from doing this. But Miliband has decided that it is a necessary move to give him the freedom to craft his own top team and to strike against the old, factional Labour culture. Miliband has asked Tony Lloyd, chair of the PLP, to hold a secret ballot of Labour MPs on the change before parliament goes down for the summer. If they approve, it will then be passed to the NEC with the process ending with a vote at conference. Under Miliband’s proposed new arrangements, the PLP will be represented in shadow cabinet by its elected chair.

When Ed Balls is around, there are no shortages of stories. Balls, as is so often the case, has been the talk of Westminster today. First, there was the chatter generated by the FT’s story that members of the shadow Cabinet were irritated that Balls’ proposed VAT cut hadn’t been run past them. Then, there was Alistair Darling strikingly failing to endorse Balls’ VAT cut on the Daily Politics and to round it all off the shadow Chancellor was leading for Labour in its opposition day debate on the economy. The Tories are convinced that Balls’ relations with his fellow shadow Cabinet members is a weak spot for Labour. Indeed, many of the 13 interventions that Tory MPs made on Balls today were on this point.

Quite some claim from Ed Balls, writing in the Sunday Mirror today. "Let's be clear what George Osborne's game is," he blusters, "he's trying to pick a fight about pensions, provoke strikes and persuade the public to blame the stalling economy on the unions." And it is a charge that Andy Burnham repeated on Dermot Murnaghan's Sky show earlier. I was on live-tweeting duty, and lost count of how many times the shadow education secretary used phrases such as "provocation," "confrontation," "playing politics," and "back to the 1980s." This, clearly, is an attack that Labour are determined to push as relentlessly as possible. George Osborne is politicking, they are saying, at the nation's expense. It is, at the very least, an intriguing gambit on Labour's part.

It has been a turbulent, ol' week for Ed Miliband — all the way from those Ed Balls files, through his most substantial speech so far, to that bruising Twitter appearance. By way of putting a full-stop to it all, here's an interview that our deputy editor, Mary Wakefield, conducted with him in 2007. This is MiliMinor, aged 37, and relatively carefree:  The charm of Ed Miliband, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 2 June 2007 Sitting opposite Ed Miliband MP in a large and airy office, the sort of office that befits the Minister for the Third Sector, I suddenly have the surreal impression that I’m at the doctor’s. It’s the medicinal green of the carpet but, more than that, it’s Ed’s demeanour.

"First he denies his own policy, then he tries insults." So said Ed Miliband of David Cameron's performance in PMQs today. But I wonder what he'd say of the hundreds of Twitter users who went straight for the insults in a special Q&A with the Labour leader earlier. Urged on by Guido, plenty deployed the #AskEdM hash-tag to be rather unkind to MiliMinor. Here's a selection of some of the crueller, funnier and less comradely tweets: @MTPT: If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill? @FelicityParkes: Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll. @MShapland: hows your brother @Charlesm186: how many knives did you put in Tony Blair's back? @alexmassie: Was Brutus an honourable man? Discuss.