What IF the Labour Party loses its Ed?

The last couple of weeks has been filled with speculation about the future of Ed Miliband, who, let’s face it, has not been performing brilliantly. He has his defenders, and they may yet be proved right, but as time goes on his position seems more and more untenable, but will Ed go?

I think the answer, quite simply, is no. The problem, as I see it, is that most of the people in Labour who want Ed Miliband gone are former Blairites. They have their first issue: there is no obvious Blairite successor to Ed Miliband. David Miliband could come back, but it is far from certain that he would, rumours persist that his wife wants him out of politics.

David comes with his own downsides too, it is worth remembering that. If David Miliband had been 100% certain to win the next election he would have won the leadership. The fact is that David Miliband comes with some of the same issues as Ed: he is not a particularly inspiring speaker, and he has a bit of a nerdy image. Some may laugh at this but Ed Miliband’s supporters in the leadership contest used to say he was the one who ‘spoke human’. If David doesn’t run then the Blairites have another issue on their hands: who is the obvious Blairite? There simply isn’t one.

The other issue is Ed Balls, and his small, but highly loyal faction. As Brown’s most loyal lieutenant Balls always appears to me to harbour a deep dislike, maybe even hatred, of Blairites that he has inherited from Brown. If an opposition political party wants to change leader mid-term then generally the desire is to it as quickly and easily as possible. For the main opposition party this pretty much necessitates a coronation, a leadership election takes too much time, too much resources that need to be spent on opposing the government. They are also divisive affairs, and unseating a leader is automatically divisive in the first place. The appearance of division is itself a turn-off to the electorate, ultimately politicians know this and that is why, for example, Gordon Brown was never gotten rid of, the potential cost was just too high. The danger is that if Ed Miliband goes the party is plunged into a leadership contest it can ill-afford between Blairites on the one hand and the Balls faction on the other, either in the form of an Ed Balls leadership campaign, or in the form of his wife, Yvette Cooper, running for the leadership.

Running a party after taking over leadership mid-term is hard enough as it is. Ask Michael Howard, who could only pick up the pieces and stabilise the Conservatives after IDS, he never had the ability to truly move his party forward. He had neither the time, nor the political capital inside his party. He had become leader not because of his vision, but to hold his party together.

It is hard to see who in the Labour Party could both gain cross-party consensus for an uncontested coronation and who could then go on to win an election. It is an almost impossible task.

The other alternative is some kind of gentleman’s agreement, a Blairite leader for an Ed Balls Chancellorship, but for those of you with longer memories this probably immediately rings huge alarm bells regarding another agreement between two Labour politicians which eventually soured extraordinarily badly. It also risks ceding economics policy to Balls, the area where he most strongly differs from Blairites in tactics, values and emphasis.

In a strange sense then, Ed Miliband, without really meaning to, appears to have become a sort of unity leader in a divided party. On the deficit, in particular, he holds a mid-ground between Balls and the Blairites. So yes, ultimately I think Ed Miliband will still be leader of the Labour Party at the next election, because I think the potential risks of getting rid of him outweigh the risks of keeping him.