“He needs to be much more Blair-like”

Before I logged off for Christmas, I wondered what Mehdi Hasan made of his co-author James Macintyre’s despairing of Ed Miliband, the subject of their joint “sympathetic” biography.

We found out in yesterday’s Times (pay wall). What Hasan thinks of the Labour leader can fairly be paraphrased as: Not much. The important bit:

It isn’t just the economy that is flatlining. So too is Mr Miliband. The Labour leader has failed to cut through to the voters. His personal poll ratings are dire: just one in five voters thinks he is up to being prime minister; one in four voters confuses him with his brother David.

The Labour leader has been far too cautious, too complacent, over the course of this year. There have been bursts of decisiveness (standing up to the Murdochian strangehold on British politics) and ruthlessness (scrapping Shadow Cabinet elections) but far too few of them. His focus on the “squeezed middle” and the need for a more “responsible” capitalism has resonated with the public — but he has failed to articulate these in a way that voters can easily understand.

Above all else, he struggles as a rhetorician in set-piece speeches and primetime interviews. Mr Miliband is the exact reverse of Tony Blair: for this Labour leader, politics is an intellectual, not a theatrical, pursuit. He needs to be much more Blair-like in front of the cameras. His aides pretend to be unperturbed: “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” is the inane response. Er, no, it isn’t. The window of time in which people’s opinion of a leader is formed, in which negative perceptions irreversibly harden and solidify, is closing, and closing fast.

Resonate and articulate (especially failure to articulate a vision) are reliable indicators of vacuity, and cautiousness and complacency do not seem to me to be accurate diagnoses of Miliband’s failings. Nor would I describe their cause, as Macintyre does, as an absence of “radicalism”, another word that means everything and nothing.

But Hasan and Macintyre grasp that something is wrong, and that puts them on my side in the historic struggle, after a brief separation, thus illustrating the line that David Cameron fluffed at the the last Prime Minister’s Questions. Ed Miliband has succeeded where Tony Blair failed: he has united the Labour Party. I won’t say in what, or Jackie Ashley will call me vicious again, but really she should have a word with the authors of the Labour leader’s life.

Recent Posts on Eagle Eye - Breaking views from commentators -

• Boris Johnson and the euro brick wall
• Wow. The graph to delight Miliband backers
• The Growth Agenda
• Blairite and Brownite coalition re-forged
• Poll: Labour gain as Tories suffer from euro crisis