Ed’s inbox – July 20th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

If Ed Miliband could only read five blogposts each day, he’d read these ones…

Cameron slumps to four-year low as Miliband seizes initiative on hacking – Political Scrapbook
By Political Scrapbook

As the government struggles to control the phone hacking scandal, a survey published today puts Ed Miliband eight points ahead of the prime minister as public approval of David Cameron slumps to a four year low.

“Cameron’s satisfaction ratings have fallen and are his lowest since becoming Prime Minister (and lower than any of his ratings as leader of the Opposition since September 2007)”

The monthly tracker for Reuters asks a number of questions, including a crucial assessment of voters’ satisfaction with party leaders. While Miliband still has a negative rating, his handling of the hacking crisis has sees him up 7 points in one month while Cameron’s net approval has crashed, dropping by 13 percent. – Read more.

Labour’s new general secretary – Progress
By Luke Akehurst

Among the most serious choices any NEC member faces is who to vote for in the choice of a new general secretary of the Labour party. I and 30 other NEC members faced that decision yesterday. We were lucky in that a strong field of candidates had applied and we were presented with a shortlist of two, either of whom would have made an excellent general secretary.

Chris Lennie, the current deputy general secretary, and Iain McNicol, the GMB’s political officer, both shared strong experience working for the party itself and for a trade union (Chris used to be a Unison official), an absolute loyalty to Ed Miliband, and a commitment to thoroughgoing reform of the party machine.

It was a difficult choice but I am proud to have voted for Iain McNicol and delighted that the NEC as a whole picked Iain. – Read more.

Ed Miliband ends the Baldwin controversy – FT Westminster Blog
By Kiran Stacey

Every time Labour raises the issue of Andy Coulson during a debate on phone hacking, someone from the Tory benches (usually Graham Stuart, for some reason) gets up to ask about his press chief, Tom Baldwin, the former Times journalist.

Baldwin has been attacked by the prominent Tory funder Lord Ashcroft for an investigation he carried out into Ashcroft’s finances, and been accused of illegally accessing his bank details.

Labour have pointed out that no wrongdoing has ever been found, and that his investigation was more clearly in the public interest than hacking into phones of celebrities and missing children. But to no avail – the questions about Baldwin persist.

Now Ed Miliband appears to have killed it, with one line: “Tom Baldwin’s line manager at the time was the current education secretary.” – Read more.

Bank bonuses make a mockery of the Tories’ rhetoric – The Staggers
By George Eaton

We’ve already highlighted five stories that slipped under the radar this week as the phone hacking scandal gathered pace. Here’s another one: figures from the ONS show that bank bonuses totalled £14bn this year, unchanged from the previous year and higher than the 2008-09 figure of £12 billion. Significantly, the bonus pool is now 58 per cent higher than in 2000-01. Banks and insurance companies paid 40 per cent of all bonuses despite employing only 4 per cent of the workforce.

It’s further evidence of the gap between the Tories’ tough rhetoric in opposition and their inaction in power. In 2009, George Osborne called for a ban on bonuses at banks that had received any sort of government guarantee. He told the Guardian:

It is totally unacceptable for bank bonuses to be paid on the back of taxpayer guarantees … It must stop. – Read more.

This is not the ‘Blue Labour view’ on immigration – Next Left
By Marc Stears

“Blue Labour’s line on immigration is toxic.” That was a headline I woke up to this morning. I greeted it initially with some disbelief for the simple reason that I didn’t know there was a “Blue Labour line” on immigration. But then I realized that it came on the back of an incendiary Daily Express front page citing an apparent report produced by Maurice Glasman for Ed Miliband calling for an immediate moratorium on the vast majority of immigration to Britain.

There is no such report, of course. That was a fiction in true Daily Express style. But Maurice Glasman has nonetheless made a series of comments in interviews with the Fabian Review and with the Guardian this week and so the story begins. – Read more.