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Fingerspitzengefühl

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Fingerspitzengefühl


IN THE run-up to the 1997 election Roy Jenkins compared Tony Blair to a man carrying a Ming vase across a slippery floor. Labour’s then-leader was on track for a dazzling win (consistently twenty points or more ahead of the Conservatives in polls of voting intention). All he had to do was tread gingerly until election day.

The same cannot be said of his successor-but-one, Ed Miliband. With six months to go until the next election, Labour’s chances of victory are shrinking. Its polling lead over the Conservatives has slipped from a modest six points at the start of the year to one or even zero points now (four recent YouGov polls have put the two parties neck-and-neck). Mr Miliband’s personal ratings are worse: fully 74% of voters think that he is performing poorly. Over the weekend there was talk of leadership challenges. Newspapers both friendly and hostile to Labour were full of mostly anonymous quotes from MPs and shadow ministers decrying their leader’s performance.

In the circumstances, this is somewhat surprising. Two Conservative MPs have defected to UKIP since the summer; more may follow. David Cameron is grasping around for a new pledge on immigration that will win back voters from UKIP without upsetting Britain’s European neighbours (a task that looks increasingly quixotic). An unexpected increase in Britain’s EU budget liabilities further agitated Tory back benchers. This evening dozens of his MPs will defy the prime minister in a vote on British participation in EU justice and home affairs measures. And next week UKIP will likely win a by-election in Rochester that should have been a walkover for the Tories.

Why, then, is Mr Miliband the one on the rocks? The Labour leader’s personal polling has never been stellar; nor has his party come close to the heights of popularity that it reached in the mid-1990s. But even by the turbulent standards of his leadership (early 2012 and summer 2013 were also moments of crisis) the past two months have been especially rocky. One cause was the Scottish referendum on independence. Although the unionist side prevailed on September 18th, some one in three Labour voters backed secession. Mr Miliband’s appearances on the campaign trail had been deemed unspectacular. Moreover, since the referendum membership of the secessionist Scottish National Party has tripled and it has surged ahead in polls of voting intention. At the current rate Labour could lose half of its 41 seats north of the border in next year’s general election.

It faces threats in two other erstwhile heartlands. In post-industrial bits of the north (and a few run-down towns in the south) it has its own UKIP problem. That much was evident from the by-election on October 9th in Heywood and Middleton, a constituency outside Manchester, in which UKIP – despite having no prior infrastructure in the area – lost to the party by just 617 votes. In other parts of the country, particularly youthful parts of big cities and university towns, Labour is also being squeezed by the Green Party, which has overtaken the Liberal Democrats in some polls of voting intention. The combination of these new threats – the SNP, UKIP and the Greens – and the decline in the flow of former Lib Dem and Tory voters to Labour explains the party’s shrinking lead, as these charts by Anthony Wells of YouGov on the website May2015 show. The first depicts the churn between the different parties from the 2010 general election to 2012:

Including respondents who did not know how they would vote, or said that they did not intend to do so, 29.3% of voters said that they intended to vote Labour. By 2014 (below) that had shrunk to 26.3%:

But it is Mr Miliband’s response to this polling (or lack thereof) that has allowed worries about it to metastasise. Labour MPs grumble about his “vanishing act” during periods of bad coverage, his isolated and chaotic private office, his mediocre broadcast performances and the squabbles and rivalries that plague the party’s campaign and manifesto preparations. The Tories’ problems may be greater, says one shadow cabinet insider, but the Conservative machine nevertheless looks much better prepared to withstand the pressures of the election campaign next year.

Admittedly, talk of a “coup” against Mr Miliband is exaggerated. Even if twenty shadow ministers are willing to call on him to go, as a report in yesterday’s The Observer claimed, without a unifying challenger their dissent is self-defeating (a point that Miliband allies like Lord Kinnock have been making in the media today). The only figure who could move against the Labour leader with any substantial support would be Alan Johnson, the former home secretary. He has ruled out doing so. In the coming weeks the Labour leader will attempt to draw a line under his recent problems. Today at the CBI’s annual conference he attacked the Conservatives for putting Britain’s EU membership at risk. Later in the week he will give a speech on the economy. Mr Miliband also has three major policy announcements to make before the end of January. Aides hope that these will help to improve public perceptions of him and his party.

This is probably too optimistic. Mr Miliband already has plenty of policy; some of it good. He has a thorough analysis of the causes and effects of Britain’s long period of wage stagnation; much of it perspicacious. His problem is of a different nature: he struggles to put across his views accessibly and lacks what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl (the intuitive “finger tip feeling” for tone and timing). The task before a leading politician is not just to come up with policy responses to the country’s problems. It is to build coalitions of allies, command personal loyalty, use language and images innovatively and expressively, seize opportunities to make parables of news stories and to articulate the national mood. Mr Blair did that by the bucket-load. So did Bill Clinton. To a lesser extent, so does Mr Cameron and did Margaret Thatcher. Farther afield, Angela Merkel is better at it than her dour image would suggest.

To a certain extent, Mr Miliband cannot solve this problem. He is by instinct and character a wonk. In Gordon Brown’s Treasury he curated a list of possible future policies, constantly honing them, looking at them from every tactical and economic angle. When writing a speech, he likes to organise his ideas into thematic “buckets”, as undergraduates are taught to do when writing an essay or as management consultants do when grappling with a commercial problem. This cautious, constantly analytical state of mind makes a good policy adviser. But it does not necessarily make a great leader. Perhaps, in Mr Miliband’s case, it cannot. If he is to prove otherwise, he must act fast to find a way of expressing himself more starkly, spontaneously and emotively; among his team, his MPs and the voters. Unlike Mr Blair in 1996, Labour’s leader is not carrying a priceless Ming vase across a slippery floor. Treading gingerly will get him nowhere.



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