Ed Miliband, potentially an outstanding prime minister, is entitled to his party’s unreserved support

An overall majority for David Cameron’s Conservatives at next May’s general election would be a calamity for Britain. Even life-long Conservative supporters are aghast at the prospect of a likely British exit from the EU: the completion of the dismantling of the welfare state: the further exploitation of perfectly manageable security problems in order to salami-slice away what’s left of our civil liberties: the continued demonising of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, pauperised in the interests of the rich: economic and fiscal policies calculated to widen divisions in our society at the expense of the country’s overall prosperity: crudely xenophobic and economically illiterate official attitudes to immigration — all this reflecting the far-right ideology of the new generation of Tory garagistes, and cynical pandering to the self-serving prejudices of reactionary newspaper proprietors.

Since the only practical alternative to this grim prospect is a Labour or Labour-led government with Ed Miliband as its prime minister, we have an obvious right to expect the Labour party, especially its representatives in parliament, to be bending every effort to the cause of a Labour victory next May. How bitterly disappointing, then, to find internal warfare within the parliamentary Labour party breaking out at precisely the moment when unity and loyalty are so desperately needed! The dominant reaction to this failure to rise to the challenge, among not only Labour supporters but also ordinary people with Britain’s interests at heart, must be not sadness but anger.

It’s hard to believe that Labour members of parliament, including apparently Labour shadow ministers on the front bench, are joining in the campaign by a panicky Conservative party and the most vitriolic right-wing newspapers to discredit and destroy Ed Miliband’s leadership of the party and with it any hope of defeating the Tories in May. Which side are these cowardly anonymous people on?

It’s no secret that a majority of Labour MPs didn’t support the younger Miliband in the leadership election of September 2010, preferring his brother David. It’s less often noticed that if the election had been held on the basis of one member, one vote, without weighting of votes in favour of MPs and against trade union members, Ed would still have won outright on a single ballot, beating David by more than 11,000 votes. In any case, even under the weighted voting system accepted by the party as a whole, Ed was the clear winner, and it has been the unequivocal political and moral duty of every Labour MP since that election to support their democratically elected leader. Instead, the unreconstructed Blairites, who had overwhelmingly supported David Miliband for the leadership, have in many cases withheld their unreserved support from Ed Miliband, some seeking to safeguard their flawed ministerial records in the Blair and Brown governments by undermining the new leader’s efforts to abandon and reverse discredited Blairite policies, e.g. on Iraq and other interventionism and on the steady erosion of our civil liberties under New Labour.

History is littered with examples of Tory attempts, sometimes successful, contemptuously to belittle Labour leaders who have never or not yet been prime minister as “not up to the job”, lacking the necessary weight and gravitas, small political figures with big disqualifying character defects. Churchill’s sneers at Attlee before he was elected prime minister in a landslide in 1945 are still remembered. Harold Wilson was systematically dismissed as a light-weight and left-wing extremist until he became one of the most effective (and still most widely underrated) prime ministers of the 20th century. Neil Kinnock would have been a powerful, perhaps great, prime minister had his reputation not been destroyed by a vindictive Tory press and a malignant Conservative personal campaign against him before he had the chance to show what he could do. Now Ed Miliband is the victim of a similar campaign of vilification, made more vicious by a barely concealed streak of anti-semitism. The Labour leadership in parliament should reject it with contempt, instead of seeking to exploit it in a short-sighted and discreditable panic over transient poll figures.

A few months ago I was in the small audience for a set-piece policy speech by Ed Miliband at the Battersea Power Station conference centre. From the time when he strode into the hall he dominated the proceedings by the force of his intelligence, mastery of detail, courtesy in answering questions without resorting to cheap debating points, confidence in his own ability to expound new policies without the need for prompting by aides, and his obvious commitment to humane, effective, economically literate government in place of the harsh incompetent shambles of coalition rule. He looked and sounded like the big man that he really is. If he could project these qualities to the wider electorate there would be little doubt about his prime ministerial credentials. To do so he needs the enthusiastic and vocal support of his colleagues in the Labour leadership. He is entitled to that support. So are we.