Oh, what a week that was

Blink, show any signs of hesitation and you’re in trouble. Yes, politics, is a bit of a blood sport, displays the least sign of vulnerability and opponents are like hounds ready to rip out your guts. Not recommended for the faint hearted

Poor Ed Miliband finds himself in this very situation after a conference week that he’d rather forget. Gaffes there were aplenty. Many that could be laid directly at young Ed’s feet.

Indeed Plaid Cymru’s Jonathan Edwards MP was quick to claim that the Labour Leader had followed a series of glaring errors in an interview about the Labour party in Scotland with similar mistakes in an interview to BBC Wales.

Edwards said that the Labour leader wrongly said, “Carwyn got elected with the largest ever majority that Labour had in the Welsh Assembly”. Well as gaffes go, small beer indeed.

But in the context of a week of own goals it just adds to the prevailing mood that the man’s not up to the job.

It was a bad Labour Party conference full of contradictions. Cameron was the real winner with Labour having failed to land a punch on such an easy target.

As this blog indicated just after the leaders speech, the younger Miliband doesn’t look like a Prime Minister. Nice guy, but prime minister, you’re having a laugh.

One has to go back to the quiet man speech of Ian Duncan Smith to find delivery and content as bad. And we all know what happened to him.

The week delivered many hostages to fortune. They even made a commitment to spend all the taxpayers’ money wisely. Gosh, indeed.Prizes if any reader can name a government that hasn’t entered office with that very same intention. 


But what happens, events, dear boy. There will be some event or some project that doesn’t work out and members of the fourth estate will have a field day pointing out the unwise use of money.

But, perhaps, the authoritarian lurch that conference took is its greatest worry. In the guise of the new morality journalist’s working under license, the deserving will jump the queue over the undeserving for access to housing, a judgment will be made as to what constitutes a good or a bad businesses and even a thumbs down was given to TV’s “Big brother.”

Just like John Major’s Back to Basics helped undo the Conservatives this too will be seen as a millstone round Labour’s neck. Voters always suspect politicians that get all moral over them. 

All, in all, the chances of the younger Milliband being Leader of the Opposition at the time of the next election is slim indeed. If not him, who?

Well, not the elder Miliband for sure. The Miliband brand will be seen as toxic. 


The time has come for Labour to shed its macho past and choose a woman leader, who better than Yvette Cooper. She could be seen as the candidate to unite the three wings of Labour, namely trade unions, MPs and party members.

The wife living in number ten and husband next door in eleven Downing Street. That really would be a first in British politics. Now there’s an interesting thought.