Ed’s second chance – but there will be consequences

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

It was right to give him a second chance, David Cameron told a press conference yesterday. He was talking about Andy Coulson of course, but he could just as easily have been talking about Ed Miliband. Just a week ago the Labour leader was in trouble. Worse than being seen as irrelevant, or alienating his party over public sector strikes, he was rapidly becoming a laughing stock. His now infamous “robo-Mili” interview – “the strikes are wrong…negotiating table…government have been reckless” – had seem him lampooned. The criticism had jumped, as it so often does now, from online into the print press.

And yet worse was to come. On Monday we announced the results of our monthly “State if the Party” survey. It was disastrous for Miliband. 53% of you said that he was doing a poor or very poor job as Labour leader. He needed something big to get him back in the game, and it came, just in time.

The phone hacking scandal that surrounded the News of the World went up a gear – several gears, it would transpire – and all of a sudden Ed was on the front foot. A sure footed response to these fresh(ish) allegations was followed by his best performance yet at PMQs. The story was advanced by a remarkable debate in the commons. Advertisers fell like skittles, the paper closed it’s doors. And still Miliband looked strong, composed and prepared. A tough interview on Newsnight didn’t phase him. Was this still the same Ed we had seem just a week before?

And yet if a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eternity. On Friday morning Tory grandee Lord Ashcroft launched an attack on the Labour leader for hiring former Times journalist Tom Baldwin as his director of strategy. Ashcroft’s war with Baldwin is long-standing and personal, so that was of interest, but not unexpected. Yet today The Sun took up the cudgels – picking up from where Ashcroft had begun and running with it. “Red Ed in quiz over spin doctor’s ‘drug use'” they cried.

And this is the long-term (or specifically four year) risk for Ed Miliband. By attacking News International this week – and breaking an edict sent down from his own office just a few months ago not to link BskyB and NotW – Miliband has given his leadership a new lease of life. Yet as momentous as this week’s events may seem now – and they’ll game changing for the British print press – in months they will be history. In years they will be forgotten. Their capacity to shock and appall us will have ended. And then, as Labour gears up for the next election, News International will strike.

The bile and opprobrium that poured from the pages of the Sun in September 2009 – and ended Gordon Brown’s electoral chances for good – will live long in the memory of anyone who attended that bleakest of Labour conferences. But it will be nothing compared to what will rain down upon Ed Miliband’s head come the next election.

The Labour leader has made a powerful enemy, and he was right to do so – as Ed has said himself, he should have done so sooner – but there will be consequences for Miliband, and today was just a taster of what that will feel like…