Guardian front-page attacks Two Eds’ performance

The season of midwinter Solstice goodwill lasted exactly 24 hours in the Labour Party. This morning – with a banner headline no less – The Mandelsonian aka Guardian was straight back on Ed’s case.

This is quite significant, because first, The Guardian never features bad poll news for Labour; and second, the spin put on the data is openly anti-Ed Miliband: it refers to ‘Labour’s failure to make progress on the all-important financial battleground’ – a clear swipe at Ed Balls hammered home with this sharp thrust of the knife:

‘Asked to put their own voting intentions to one side and consider which team is better able to “manage the economy properly”, 44% of respondents plumped for Cameron and Osborne, as against just 23% who preferred Miliband and the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls. The 21-point gap in the favour of the Conservatives is almost twice as large as the 11-point margin they enjoyed on this count in October’s Guardian/ICM poll. At the end of a year which has seen both a renewed rise in unemployment and an unexpectedly sharp jump in the cost of living, Labour will be especially dismayed by these results.’

But the piece dwells at length on the contrast between Claymation EdM  and Toughguy Dave:

‘By a 10-point margin of 50% to 40%, voters judge [Cameron] to be “good in a crisis”, an attribute which pollsters say is especially valued in political leaders. For Miliband the position is dramatically different, with just 21% deeming him to be good in a crisis against 44% who take the opposite view, a deficit of 23 points.’

In fact, some of the data will worry the Coalition: 3 in 5 respondents believe Cameron “does not understand people like me”, and by a two-to-one margin, voters say Britain will be “a more miserable country” next year. But the tone (and front-page position) of this piece show the hand of Lord Fondlebum. Lines such as ‘The findings come in the wake of reports about Labour’s high command growing restive about its failure to break through on the economy’ are pure Mandy. The ‘reports’ consist of, um, one…in the Guardian last week. No sources or substantition were offered in the piece.

This is the second major offensive launched by the Blairite modernisers. The first was Mandy’s dig at the Ed Miller Band’s awful PMQs performance, the subtext of which was that Ed didn’t seem to have a better solution than Blairism.

Allegedly, the disgraced but as yet unconvicted Peer Manglesum has retired from active politics. But not, it seems, from hyperactive plotting.