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The 100-day way-marker to the next election should be the point when thoughts cohere, priorities clarify and leaders establish that they are the ones we can bear to live with for the next few years. Labour approached this symbolic point last week in reasonable shape: snapping at the Tories’ heels in the polls, with a message focused on the cost of living and a potent attack on a Coalition that has neither reformed the NHS nor reassured voters about its future.
How quickly these assets have crumbled. In the distrustful Elsinore of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband is flanked by many, ranging from Ed Balls on the centre-Left to future hopes Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt to his Right, who suggest that they are putting up with their leader until the real thing comes along. The spasm of doubt over Ed’s abilities ranges from the Islington intellectual redoubts of the New Statesman, whose editor thinks Miliband is “haunted” by the prospect of defeat, to Jim Murphy, the new leader of Scottish Labour, who distrusts Miliband’s management of the fightback in Scotland, and Peter Mandelson (yes, it’s that man again), who recently told me that he was “helping” Ed, only to be now seen by Miliband loyalists as biding his time to promote his old protégé, Hunt.
Given an open goal, Miliband flunks it rather often, from “forgetting” the deficit in his conference speech to a floundering Prime Minister’s Question Time this week on whether he is “weaponising” the NHS. This is precisely what Miliband intends to do, even if the word is a liability.
But nowhere is the gap between aspiration on the one hand and resources and vision on the other greater than it is on the NHS. Labour cannot explain how it would create efficiencies and reforms to a patchily delivered, cash-strapped health service because Miliband’s appeal is to the lowest-common denominator instincts of his party rather than the ambitious thinking a modern social democratic party needs if it is not to supply the answers from the late Eighties for the problems of 2015.
Add to that a general anti-business buzz and you can see why donors, reformers and better-off supporters are getting antsy. There are too many instances of “nice idea, shame about the practicalities”, such as the volte-face on an energy-price freeze, which had to be hastily redesignated as a “cap” when energy markets turned out to be too volatile to be gamed by ministers who understand even less about their vagaries than the big players.
If Miliband’s chances are waning however, they have not evaporated. The only contender as worried about his future after May is David Cameron. As Labour was boiling over with internal resentments I bumped into a senior Tory adviser who has returned from the private sector to help with the campaign. That looked like confidence, I said. “It is still a very uncertain election for us,” came the anxious reply. True, Labour has no poll lead, but it is level pegging with the Tories (and slightly up on previous results, according to Lord Ashcroft’s polls of marginal seats).
The two parties share many weaknesses. Both have failed to foresee or deal with the rise of major threats to their base: the Tories by deriding Ukip while it has advanced steadily into its territory in the south of England and Labour by having no strategy for stopping the SNP from eating its lunch north of the border. When Lord Ashcroft, the donor-turned-pollster-turned-Cassandra, publishes his poll of Scottish seats this week, it is likely to look bloody for Ed. The SNP alchemy continues to transform defeat in the referendum into political success.
But nationalism could yet pay dividends for Labour. For one thing, a Labour government could be propped up either by the Lib-Dems or the SNP, whereas the SNP would not help a Conservative government rule the roost at Westminster, leaving Cameron to rely on a possible tie-up with Northern Ireland’s DUP if a deal with the Lib-Dems falls short. As Kenneth Clarke once observed: “In the end you can always do a deal with an Ulsterman.” The arithmetic decides that, not the politicians.
Many commentators are talking of a political landscape so fragmented by Greens, nationalists and Ukip that the whole edifice of the voting system is threatened and we are living in a politically uncharted Narnia. In many respects though, this is rather like old times, and like Narnia, someone always has been there before: namely in the Seventies, when the Ulster Unionists were kingmakers and Jim Callaghan’s Labour turned to a Lib-Lab pact to survive. Promiscuity in deal-making by leaders trying to cobble together a majority is unsettling but far from novel.
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In such circumstances laurels often end up with the leader who has most self-confidence and can keep their head — and their job — when others are losing theirs. For this reason, Miliband is not wrong to game out how he might end up in Number 10, even if his overall result is poor. Everyone can fight afterwards about how fair this is and if they really do want to change the voting system (which we did not, last time we were asked). An X factor will help decide the election: namely, who wins the battle of leadership and purveys a greater sense of authority. Cameron can be infuriatingly casual, lacking in conviction and a touch haughty. But he still maintains the look and feel of a leader, which is why his fractious party has not been tempted to ditch him.
Themes and schemes are all very well, but election campaigns invite voters to frame their choice through the personalities of party leaders as well as pledges or philosophy. Because the Tories are happier with their helmsman, warts and all, than Labour is with its choice, they remain the party marginally more confident of victory. They might very well be wrong. But in the clashes of next few weeks, it will be a consideration that counts.