"All right, fine, but you're missing the crucial point," said one of David Cameron's captains, when Bagehot bothered him with some snipe or other at the Conservatives' loveless election campaign. "The one thing all our focus groups tell us is that no one wants Ed Miliband to be prime minister". The unpopularity and unnerving left-wing idealism of the Labour Party's gauche leader is the Tories' comfort blanket. The economic recovery they have overseen may appear to be voteless, their spending cuts to be semi-permanent and the uk Independence Party (UKIP) to have pinched a fifth of their followers. Yet they take solace in the haplessness, which they consider terminal, of a politician who used the unions to best his abler brother, David, was in turn beaten by a bacon sandwich, and who has had the worst ratings of any Labour leader in recent times. Mr Mi-liband's main achievement, according to his allies, is to have held his party together; he has performed that service for the Tories, too. If deficit reduction was the raison d'etre of their coalition government, Miliband reduction has kept the Tories united. They simply cannot quite believe that, despite Labour's big advantages in this election, including a windfall of disaffected Liberal Democrat votes and an electoral map stacked in its favour, Britons could send such a despised politician to 10 Downing Street.
展开▼
