Peter Hoskin

Was Ed's Big Speech worth the extended wait? Not really. It wasn't a stone-cold terrible speech, but neither was it the rambunctious, attention-grabbing number that his leadership could do with. In fact, we could have saved ourselves the effort by simply reading his New Year's message again. That was considerably shorter, and covered almost all of the same ground. Squeezed middle? Check. Tackling vested interests? Check. An admission that Labour will need to cut? Ch… oh, you get the point. The best that could be said about today's speech is that it presented some of these arguments more clearly than in the past. Indeed, the attack on George Osborne's fiscal agenda was, by Miliband's usual standards, particularly punchy.

‘Every day, in every way, it's getting worse for Ed Miliband.’ That's what I said last Thursday, and it has been more or less borne out since then. Friday, of course, brought that Twitter embarrassment. Saturday, the subsequent headlines, as well as Miliband's unconvincing attempt to push back against them. Sunday featured some of the most vicious attacks on his leadership by Labour MPs so far. And even today we've got the sort of ‘helpful’ advice from a senior Labour figure — in this case, Alan Johnson, suggesting that ‘too often we sound like a debating society rather than a political party’ — that comes across as frustrated criticism.

James has already blogged the Sunday Telegraph's interview with David Cameron, but some other things stand out from it — and not just the PM's unthinking attack on Ed Balls either, for which he has since apologised. Take these paragraphs on tax, for instance: ‘The Prime Minister effectively rules out any move towards a “mansion tax” — a levy on high-priced properties proposed by the Liberal Democrats — or indeed any new tax on wealth. “I don’t believe, generally speaking, we should be looking at endless additional taxes.

Before Christmas, The Times's Sam Coates managed to get his hands on Labour's ‘media grid’ for the week — and much Westminster-y fun it was too. But now he's gone one better, by publishing a strategy memo that Ed Miliband's director of communications, Tom Baldwin, has produced for his Labour colleagues. It's well worth reading in full, here and here, not least because it outlines the party's argument for the coming year. In summary, though, it's much like Miliband's New Year's address: more of the same, with a side order of fiscal responsibility.

Michael Gove has never been timid in confronting the education bureaucracy, but his attack on them today is particularly — and noteworthily — unforgiving. Referring to those truculent local authorities that are blocking his schools reforms, he will say in a speech that starts in about ten minutes: ‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure — the enemies of promise — also say you can't get the same results in the inner cities as the leafy suburbs, so it's wrong to stigmatise these schools. Let's be clear what these people mean. Let's hold their prejudices up to the light. What are they saying? “If you're poor, if you're Turkish, if you're Somali, then we don't expect you to succeed.

Whenever politicians talk about social care, they tend to promise ‘cross-party talks’. It's their little euphemism for ‘we don't want to commit to a policy by ourselves.’ Don't get them wrong, it's not that they don't have ideas for fixing a system that is straining under the weight of an ageing population; the Dilnot report, released earlier this year, gave them plenty of recommendations to work with. It's just that they don't want to be the ones to implement the tax hikes or spending cuts that will be necessary to fund it. If they can talk it through with the other parties — the thinking goes — then this crucial policy area can be detoxified, the blame spread more or less evenly.

The Christmas double issue of The Spectator has now been retired from newsstands, and today our New Year edition emerges in its place. Among its articles casting forward into 2012 is a list of ten predictions by James Delingpole. Here's just one of them, as a taster: ‘Ukip will become Britain’s third largest party. This will go almost completely unreported in the media. Other headlines you won’t read: “Climategate scientists: ‘Oh all right. We confess. We’ve just been making it up as we go along’”; “Vince Cable: ‘Only the free market can save us now’”; “Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘If water cannons don’t shift ’em then we should try napalm.