The Week in Review: Miliband rising
It's happening at an almost glacial pace, but the Conservative party are finally starting to wake up to the likelihood that Ed Miliband will be prime minister after the next election.
You could hear it dawning on them during prime ministers' questions this week. Once utterly dismissive of the Labour leader, Tory backbenchers are becoming increasingly and audibly scared of him. With every relatively good week that the Labour leader has, the noise from the government benches goes up another few decibels. On Wednesday the din reached migraine-inducing levels.
So why is this? It's not that the polls have changed much in recent months. Ed Miliband's price freeze has probably increased Labour's average vote share by as little as one per cent. His personal ratings, although much better than they were, are also still pretty awful. Nor is it that the Tories' vote share has dipped. If anything, the party has recovered their position slightly in recent months.
It's just that the scale of the task facing the party is finally becoming clear to them and the conceits they have used to avoid this realisation are finally beginning to crumble. The crux of those conceits is the belief that the public will simply never vote for Ed Miliband to be prime minister. For years now this has been an almost religious belief on the Conservative benches.
But like most religious beliefs it is based on blind faith and scripture, rather than evidence. Miliband may not be the nation's favourite politician, but then neither is David Cameron or Nick Clegg. A poll this week found that faith in politicians is at all time lows with only energy bosses viewed less favourably. All three party leaders have suffered in this environment. But while the public may not like or even vote for any of them, one of the three men will still be prime minister after the next general election. All the polls show that man is most likely to be Ed Miliband.
And in the past month, this fact has looked less and less remarkable. The Labour leader has dominated the political agenda ever since his pledge to freeze energy prices last month. And he has done so, despite and perhaps even because of some pretty vicious attacks from the Daily Mail and others. His response has revealed a stronger and more human side to the Labour leader than we have seen before. And if all that wasn't enough, he even managed to be funnier than Boris Johnson at the Spectator awards this week.
Bit by bit, Tory MPs are beginning to realise that Miliband may not be quite the liability they had hoped for. And yet this realisation has not yet led to any change in their behaviour. Faced with their dreams of a Tory majority slipping away, the party is instead withdrawing into its comfort zone. This is the same comfort zone which comfortably lost them three general elections in a row. Obsessed with Europe, immigration and the unions, the Tories are increasingly looking like a poor man's Ukip, with David Cameron in the role of Godfrey Bloom.
Yet there are a few Conservative MPs who both realise their predicament and also the way out of it. The call earlier this week from a group of Tory backbenchers for David Cameron to embrace the living wage and do more to tackle living costs was both timely and sensible. It was also entirely ignored.
The scale of the difficulties facing the Conservative party are finally beginning to dawn on them. The realisation of what to do about those difficulties could take a lot longer still.
