Miliband has never sounded more prime ministerial

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 13 Απριλίου 2015 - 13:20

It was a darkened hall, but small, as if set up for a party conference in a very very thin year. And it was cold: January-cold, austerity-cold, five-more-years-of-Tory-cuts cold.

Around us were stark banners: red on white, white on red - Labour's colour back centre stage after a long period of exile in favour of purples and pastels. The central message was "Britain can be Better". But it didn't feel like it.

Five years ago the Labour manifesto was launched in a brand-new Labour-built hospital in Birmingham: Gordon Brown presiding against a summery computer-generated image of waving, sunlit barley. This time minimalism and humility reigned.

Outside the Conservatives had commandeered an expensive Manchester car park for their poster vans showing a mini-Ed Miliband poking out of the breast pocket of both Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon (an alarming thought for her, no doubt). The stunt seemed somehow discordant, like just about everything the Tories have attempted this past week.

Lord knows what goes through the minds of the party strategists who choose the venues on these occasions. Presumably the darkened room - in the old Granada TV studios - came cheap. Presumably, someone foresaw the pictorial value in the hierarchy passing the fake frontage of the Rover's Return, as used on the set of Coronation Street for half a century or so. Presumably, they liked the symbolic inclusivity of launching in the North, and so stuck close to the centre of the only northern city everyone in London has heard of.

But there was something about the event that worked far better than Labour might have dared hope. During the past few days the Tories have suddenly vacated the fiscal-rectitude chair to go on a binge-promise spree. So Mr Miliband has plonked himself down there instead: "The Conservatives have got to account for why they are now the irresponsible party in British politics. No offence to the Green party but they're making the Green party look fiscally credible."

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>The manifesto and the leader's speech were as minimalist as the set. Little is being promised, so no one can be that disappointed, can they? More urgently, first impressions are that Labour has shielded itself well against the most obvious lines of attack. In the hall, there was a furtive-looking bespectacled figure bearing a remarkable resemblance to Lynton Crosby, the Tory election guru. His brow was more furrowed afterwards than it was before, so the identification might be accurate.

Rhetorically, there was enough to please the Labour supporters brought in to paper the hall. "We will make sure the broadest shoulders bear the biggest burden," he said, and, of the prime minister, "he's strong at standing up to the weak but always weak when it comes to standing up the strong".

But Mr Miliband was not really targeting the audience. In a sense, this was not even aimed at the electorate. He was showing off his new armour to his principal enemy and daring him to work out where the Achilles heel might now be.

Nobody really looks or sounds like a prime minister until they actually get the job, certainly not a man who has to fight so hard to establish his legitimacy even as party leader. But Ed Miliband has never sounded more prime ministerial than he did here.

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