That Wednesday Feeling

Here we go again. Ed Milband was ahead in the polls for over a year, and even after the blip caused by the euro non-veto he still won his fifth by-election in a row, with the usual comfortable swing from the Conservatives. That was not a safe Labour seat. It was exactly the sort of seat the failure to win which cost the Conservative Party an overall majority. 18 months later, hardly early, there was another 8.5 per cent swing from the Conservatives to Labour. But uniformly Blairite commentators prefer their own alternate reality, just as they used to ignore Conservative victories at local or European elections and run the "Tory meltdown" story as if everything had gone according to plan.

You do realise, don't you, that PMQs takes place at the very middle point of the working week, so that it is watched by almost no one in the wider electorate? The level of abuse proves how rattled the Blairites are by Ed Miliband. And that is what they must be if they are supporters of David Cameron: Blairites. Why do you think that Cameron is supported by the Murdoch media and the BBC? The same reason why they still want David Miliband to lead a non-Opposition to the Coalition programme that he devised while running Tony Blair's Policy Unit. Correspondingly, those still pining for Tony Blair and David Miliband cannot have any political objection to the Coalition. And, in fact, do not have any. So why do people who think of themselves as Tories support it?

Most political journalists are glorified gossip columnists with absolutely no interest in real politics. They are going berserk at the prospect of a General Election that would be a proper contest both organisationally and ideologically, and which is easily on course to be won by a party outside the Blairite paradigm that passes for acceptable political debate so far as these people are concerned. Why are they still employed, if they have that little impact on public opinion? However, if they succeed in staging the sort of Blairite coup that they did against Iain Duncan Smith, who also delivered poll leads and large municipal gains, then Labour MPs should do what Tory MPs should have done, and set up a new party, with lots of union money in their case. David Miliband and any rump around him could then clear off to the Coalition, where they belong.