On the morning of the 1992 UK general election, The Sun–Britain’s bestselling daily newspaper—ran a headline on its front page that made clear to readers how they should vote. “If Kinnock wins,” the paper said, “will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” Neil Kinnock and his Labour party, despite having been ahead in the opinion polls, duly lost the election. The following day, the same newspaper ran a triumphant headline that “It’s The Sun Wot Won It.”
British elections are not presidential; the prime minister is chosen in a way not dissimilar to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. But because the prime minister is also the head of the executive branch of government, any party leader has to pass the credibility test during an election campaign. Neil Kinnock failed that test in 1992. Many in the Labour party now fear that current leader Ed Miliband may repeat the trick.
Public opinion polls consistently put Miliband running behind his own party in popularity. The current prime minister, David Cameron, who leads the Conservative party, comfortably outstrips him in personal and leadership qualities.
Now one of Miliband’s own MPs has gone public with the fear that Labour picked a loser. “Any Labour politicians that say to you they knock on a door and Ed Miliband is popular are telling lies,” said Simon Danczuk, who represents the working class constituency, or district, of Rochdale, “Constituents say things like ‘You’re doing an alright job as MP but I don’t want Ed Miliband as prime minister,’ so it’ll cost me votes.” The problem, said Danczuk, is that Miliband’s “North London elite view of the world just doesn’t play in Rochdale.”
Miliband’s image as a privileged, nerdy member of the metropolitan elite is one that he’s found difficult to shake off. Recently he got into a bizarre row about the fact that his £2 million north London house has two kitchens. Even eating a bacon sandwich in public has proved a challenge.
And then there is the ongoing soap opera with his brother David, who lost the Labour leadership election to him in 2010. David is a perpetual rebuke to his younger sibling—the “king over the water” running the International Rescue Committee, an NGO in New York, who remains poised, according to recent reports, for a return should his brother lose the election. Many, perhaps even most, Labour supporters think the party picked the wrong brother.
All of which saw Ed Miliband playing for high stakes in the first election TV debate on Thursday night. The format was an odd one, with the two leaders never actually debating face-to-face. But the event remained excellent sport, primarily because the moderator, Jeremy Paxman, is famous in Britain for his rottweiler interviewing technique.
No one discomforts a politician quite like Jeremy Paxman. During the debate, he called Ed Miliband “a north London geek” and told him that people thought it “a shame it’s not his brother.” He baited Miliband about whether he had the toughness to be prime minister. “A bloke on the tube,” Paxman sneered, “said to me last week, ‘Ed Miliband goes into a room with Vladimir Putin, the door is closed, two minutes later the door is open again and Putin is standing there smiling and Ed Miliband is all over the floor in pieces’.”
One of the themes Miliband kept returning to in response was that he has been underestimated throughout his political career. “People said I wouldn’t become leader,” he pointed out, reminding viewers (perhaps riskily) of that act of ruthless fratricide that saw him get to this position in the first place. He pushed back against Paxman in a way that demonstrated a certain mettle. And he got in the best zinger of the night. When Paxman suggested that the electorate might already have made their minds up on him, Miliband chided him for presuming to know how people might vote. “You’re important, Jeremy,” he quipped, “but not that important.”
On one level Miliband’s efforts might seem to have counted for nothing. An ICM instant poll for The Guardian gave Cameron a comfortable victory by 54% to 46%. But even those numbers narrowed a vast gap on Cameron, who has often been ahead of his rival by double digit figures in polls. Just as significantly, commentators from the left and the right broadly agreed that Ed Miliband had held his own, or perhaps even bested Cameron. Their commentary will help change the narrative about the Labour leader as a natural born loser.
Having spent a year at Harvard as a visiting scholar in 2003, Ed Miliband is a keen student of U.S. politics (and the Red Sox), so he will know his renaissance may only be a Mitt Romney moment—an unexpectedly good first debate performance, easily clearing the low bar of minimal expectations.
“Your poor mother,” the Sky News host, Kay Burley, observed at Thursday’s debate, commiserating about the the rivalry between the Miliband brothers. But as he launched Labour’s election campaign the next day, Friday, in the 2012 Olympic Stadium, Ed Miliband finally had the look of a man who believes that when polling closes on 7 May, he may still end up as “The Son Wot Won It.”