Relief for Ed...but just what will David do next?

And so after all the hoo-ha, a relatively easy win for Labour and a creditable second place for the Liberal Democrats, with Nick Clegg's party staving off the post-tuition fees meltdown some had feared.

Both Mr Clegg and Labour's Ed Miliband went into Thursday's Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election on something of a hiding to nothing - but both appear to have got away with it.

Instead, it is Prime Minister David Cameron who may have the most difficult questions to answer after appearing to soft-pedal the party's campaign in the final week.

After their party's share of the vote was more than halved while the Lib Dems' went up, Tory backbenchers already unhappy about the direction of the government will want to know why their coalition partners were given such an easy ride.

For Mr Miliband, a result which saw Labour's majority increase from 103 to 3,558 will take the pressure off – for now.

After a decidedly lacklustre start to his leadership, Mr Miliband moved to sharpen up his press operation in the weeks before Christmas and this appears to have had pretty instantaneous results.

Victory in what was already a Labour-held seat should leave little room for complacency, however.

His appointment of the economically sub-literate Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor appears to be unravelling, while his own appearance on a Radio 2 show a couple of weeks back ended in embarrassment, with Middle England listeners quizzing him over his unconventional private life.

The by-election also saw a fleeting return to the political fray for elder brother David Miliband, one of 40 Labour MPs who travelled to the constituency on Thursday for some frantic last-minute door-knocking.

It concluded what to say the least has been an eventful week for the South Shields MP, with his surprise appointment as vice-chairman of Sunderland Football Club.

At the same time, reports emerged that he was being lined-up a possible new role as a TV presenter with the BBC.

Cynics might be tempted to pose the question: What next? An appearance on 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here' maybe?

In fairness to David, he has made clear his intention to continue as a constituency MP at least until the next election, while in an interview with this newspaper before Christmas, he signalled that he has still not given up hope of leading the Labour Party one day.

He has also appeared to set out his stall as a backbench 'Voice of the North' – although his new role at the Stadium of Light scarcely seems designed to endear him to all corners of the region!

But taken together, the two stories highlight the difficulties which can face politicians when they lose their main raison d'etre – climbing the greasy pole.

And while he is not about to join the 'Z-list' of those who are famous for being famous, Mr Miliband needs to give careful thought to what he does next if he is to remain a serious political player.

The prospect of him becoming a TV presenter inevitably drew comparisons with Michael Portillo – and not for the first time.

Mr Miliband's somewhat cack-handed attempts to unseat Gordon Brown in autumn 2008 echoed Mr Portillo's botched coup against John Major in the summer of 1995 when his supporters were caught installing phonelines for a leadership campaign HQ.

Mr Portillo was regarded by many in the Conservative Party as its natural leader, but partly through circumstance and partly through lack of judgement, he ultimately became its lost leader.

There are many still hoping that David Miliband, so long seen as the 'heir to Blair,' can avoid a similar fate.

One of them, possibly both, is going to end up a loser

Given that the British electorate as a whole only gets to vote once every 4-5 years, it is perhaps inevitable that by-elections tend to wield a somewhat disproportionate influence on our political process.

Usually they follow a fairly predictable pattern. The public – or the media – identifies which of the two main opposition parties is most likely to give the governing party a good kicking, and the 'protest vote' does the rest.

But we are in unchartered waters now. There are two governing parties, only one main opposition party, and the new-ish leader of that party is something of an unknown quantity to most voters.

All of which is what makes Thursday's Oldham and Saddleworth by-election possibly the most fascinating such encounter since the Darlington contest of 1983 which, to Labour's ultimate detriment, saved the leadership of Michael Foot.

On the face of it, it ought to be plan sailing for Labour. In a few short months, the Con-Lib coalition has slashed public spending, put up VAT, and scrapped much of the regional aid budget that was helping former industrial towns like Oldham to find a new role.

Not only that, but the seat was won by Labour in the general election last May, before MP Phil Woolas was disqualified from Parliament for having lied about his Lib Dem opponent on his election literature.

One of the many imponderables in this contest is whether the fate of Mr Woolas will help or hinder Labour's cause here.

The fact that he was actually quite a popular local MP might appear to favour the party, but some voters may feel he was too readily hung out to dry by the Labour establishment, and punish the party accordingly.

Inevitably given its status as a three-way marginal, 'Old and Sad' is being viewed as something of a mini-referendum – not just on the Coalition, but on Labour leader Ed Miliband.

If Labour cannot even win by-elections in seats it already holds, serious questions will start to be asked as to whether it can win anywhere else under Mr Miliband's leadership.

But for Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, too, a defeat on Thursday would be seen as a significant blow.

His party's candidate, Elwyn Watkins, may well feel the seat is his by moral and indefeasible right having been on the wrong end of Mr Woolas's misdemeanours, but politics doesn't work like that.

Undoubtedly the leader with the least to lose and the most to gain here is Prime Minister David Cameron.

For one, the Conservative candidate Kashif Ali started the contest in third place. For another, the Tories have been accused of soft-pedalling their campaign in a bid to help their Lib Dem partners.

Perhaps realising he is in with an outside chance of a stunning victory Mr Cameron is now doing his best to dispel that impression, becoming the first premier to campaign in a by-election for 13 years.

Yet ironically a Tory win, in a seat where the Lib Dems began as the main challengers, might end up being more destabilising for the Coalition than a Labour triumph.

Mr Clegg would then face more tough questions from his own activists and MPs as to what exactly the Lib Dems are getting out of the Coalition.

A Tory victory would simply reinforce the idea that it is the Lib Dems who are taking all the political pain while Mr Cameron reaps the political dividends.

But whoever wins on Thursday, at least one and possibly both of Mr Cameron's fellow party leaders are going to be waking up to some difficult headlines on Friday morning.

And for either or both of them, that could set the tone for a tricky political year ahead.

Why 2011 is the Coalition's make-or-break year

Two weeks ago I concluded my review of the political year 2010 by posing a question which will, in my view, determine how the next 12 months in British politics ultimately pan out.

It was: can the Coalition government as a whole withstand the dramatic loss in popularity suffered by the Liberal Democrats since their decision to go into partnership with David Cameron’s Tories.

As Ricky Ponting can no doubt testify, a team is only as good as its weakest link, and with public support for the Lib Dems now barely registering in double figures, Nick Clegg’s party are clearly the weakest link in this government.

The big question for Mr Clegg is how much lower he can afford to allow that support to drop before continuing membership of the Coalition simply becomes politically unsustainable.

If any further proof were needed of the Coalition’s inherent instability, then the Vince Cable affair in the run-up to Christmas surely provided it.

There were several ironies about this episode, not least that a newspaper which shared Dr Cable’s hostility to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB managed to shoot itself so comprehensively in the foot.

But surely the biggest irony of all is that, for all the humiliation he heaped upon himself, Dr Cable turned out to be correct in his estimation that he was, in effect, unsackable.

Whatever you think of the methods used to ‘entrap’ him, any other minister who displayed such appalling naivety and lack of judgement would surely have been out of the door.

But because Mr Cameron dare not weaken the Lib Dem element of the Coalition for fear that the whole edifice will collapse, he survived - thought not without having his wings severely clipped.

So much for the events of the week before Christmas. What of the year ahead?

Well, since this is traditionally the time of year for crystal ball gazing, I’ll make a prediction. If the Coalition gets through the next 12 months, it will more than likely achieve its ambition of serving a full five-year parliamentary term.

Why is 2011 likely to prove the Coalition’s make-or-break year? Well, for starters, it is likely to become significantly more unpopular as the cuts bite, unemployment continues to rise, and the full implications of some of its more radical experiments become clear.

I have in mind here Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms and Michael Gove’s de-municipalisation of schools, neither of which can claim much of a popular mandate.

But the biggest single threat to the Coalition’s survival is the time-bomb that is due to detonate underneath it on Thursday 5 May – the referendum on the alternative voting system.

If, as many now expect, the referendum is lost, it will remove the Lib Dems’ main incentive for having entered the partnership in the first place.

For Labour leader Ed Miliband, too, this will be a critical 12 months, as he seeks to demonstrate to a sceptical public why he, and not his elder brother, is the right man for the job.

At least he now has a clearer opposition strategy, seeking to brand this a Conservative-led government supported by reluctant Liberal Democrats rather than the marriage of true minds Messrs Clegg and Cameron would like to portray.

Yet for all that, Mr Miliband is probably no more keen to bring the government down right now than Dr Cable: his party is broke, he hasn’t had time to overhaul the policies that lost it the last election, and the public doesn’t really know him.

If the Coalition does manage to survive the year, it might simply be because none of the three main parties really wants to have another election just yet.

Review of the Political Year 2010

When future historians come to assess the political events of 2010, two big counterfactual questions are likely to loom large in their minds.

They are: what if Labour had ditched Gordon Brown before the General Election, and what if the Liberal Democrats had refused to go into coalition with David Cameron's Conservatives?

The second question is probably the easier one to answer. Mr Cameron would have formed a minority government, David and not Ed Miliband would have become Labour leader, and both would now be gearing up for a fresh election in the spring.

But the more tantalising question is whether Mr Cameron might never have become Prime Minister at all had Labour gone into the election under a more popular leader.

The political year 2010 began with Mr Brown's survival once again hanging in the balance.

Former Labour ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt attempted to get MPs to demand a leadership contest, but rightly or wrongly, the consensus in the party was that by then it was too late to change horses.

As it was, the election turned into a slow-motion car crash for Labour, dominated by televised debates in which Mr Brown was predictably outshone by his two younger, more charismatic opponents.

Then, in the final week of the campaign, came 'Duffygate' - the kind of incident which could have happened to any of them, but which seemed somehow fated to happen to the luckless Mr Brown.

In terms of issues, the campaign centred mainly on the question of how to deal with the country's biggest budget deficit since the 1930s.

Here Labour was on an equally sticky wicket, with voters clearly concluding that the party was 'in denial' about the extent of the problem and crediting the Tories for being at least partially honest about the scale of the forthcoming cuts.

For all that, though, the public remained largely unconvinced by Mr Cameron and his team, and the eventual result saw the Tories falling some 20 seats short of outright victory.

Days of frantic bargaining followed, but with the parliamentary maths in favour of a Lib-Lab deal failing to stack up, it was always likely that a Lib-Con coalition would be the outcome.

Faced with the task of finding a successor to Mr Brown, Labour managed to saddle itself with the lesser-known of the Miliband brothers, courtesy of a crazy electoral system which gave the unions the decisive say.

For David Miliband, brother Ed's leadership election victory came as a bitter blow and the South Shields MP stood down from his party's frontbench.

Then, in one of his first acts as leader, Ed sacked former Minister for the North-East Nick Brown from his Shadow Cabinet team, leaving the region somewhat leaderless in Whitehall.

Indeed, with the new coalition busily taking the axe to every regional institution in sight, the North-East seemed in danger of losing its political voice altogether.

Initial excitement about the coalition soon faded. The 'new politics' spoken of by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in the TV debates soon regressed into the old politics of broken election promises.

Chancellor George Osborne had expected that the £80bn programme of cuts unveiled in his October comprehensive spending review would swiftly make him the most unpopular man in Britain.

Instead, it was Mr Clegg who became the government's fall-guy, completing his journey from hero to zero by backing the rise in tuition fees against which he had so vehemently campaigned in April and May.

The Lib Dems' decision to trade principle for power has clearly come at a huge political cost. The key question for 2011 is whether the coalition as a whole can survive it.

Anarchy in the UK? This is not the country Cameron wants to lead

It is a moot point whether Thursday's protests over the government's decision to raise universities tuition fees to £9,000 amounted to the worst civil disturbances since the poll tax riots of 1990.

One should not forget that the fuel protests of autumn 2000 came close to bringing the country to a standstill - but they were by and large peaceful.

Measured purely in terms of street violence, this week's demonstrations almost certainly constituted the biggest outpouring of public anger seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Should that be a warning sign to David Cameron and his coalition? Undoubtedly so.

The bare facts of the matter are that the government won the Commons vote on lifting the cap on fees by a majority of 21, down from its usual majority of 83.

While 28 Liberal Democrat MPs voted in support of the move, 21 defied the party leadership, including former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell and a possible future leader, Tim Farron.

Meanwhile six Tory MPs also voted against the measure, including the former leadership contender David Davis who, like Mr Farron, appears to be positioning himself for the coalition's eventual collapse.

But while the government won the vote, the question is whether in doing so it lost the argument, as well control of the streets.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the demonstrators have over-reached themselves, and that the ugliness of some of Thursday's scenes will turn the wider public against the students' cause.

In the short-term, it will have focused attention less on the fees issue than the question of whether security arrangements for the demo were even half way adequate.

But the debate over tuition fees is far from over. The House of Lords will certainly have a say on the matter, and there will have to be further legislation over the level and speed at which the fees are paid back.

That in turn is bound to lead to further rebellions which, if successful, could ultimately force the government to unpick the entire scheme.

So where does it leave the coalition? Well, firstly, what about the Lib Dems.

Their hope was that by getting the fees vote out of the way early on, it would enable them to move the political agenda onto other areas in which they are on firmer ground, such as political reform.

I wonder, however, whether memories will fade that easily, and whether we have not witnessed a seminal moment in terms of public perceptions of the third party.

It could well be that this will go down as the point at which the public stopped seeing the Lib Dems as a party of principle and started to see them as their opponents have always seem them – a bunch of opportunists who would break any promise for a taste of power.

Secondly, where do this week's events leave Mr Cameron? Despite his own protestations last week that he would "rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," he is not the Iron Lady.

His style is consensual rather than confrontational. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, he has no wish to see his premiership consumed by battles against the 'enemy within.'

Within weeks of those poll tax riots in the autumn of 1990, the Prime Minister had gone, albeit over a combination of that and other issues.

That is not going to happen to Mr Cameron just yet. But in his desire to lead a broadly united country, he won't want to see too many more weeks like this one.

Labour don't do assassinations, but if they did....

When Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader on the opening day of the party's conference in Manchester in September, a leading Tory blogger delivered a withering verdict on the result.

"They’ve missed out Hague and gone straight to IDS," said Paul Staines, author of the Guido Fawkes blog which, while not exactly impartial in its coverage of the political scene, is not without influence at Westminster.

Staines was, so far as I am aware, the first political pundit to make the comparison between 'Red Ed' and the failed Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, but he certainly hasn't proved to be the last.

"It may be too early to start talking about Ed Miliband not making it to the next election as Labour leader, but many more performances at PMQs as poor as he put on today and it won’t be long before he’s in IDS territory," said another this week.

Wednesday's Prime Minister's questions should have been a breeze for Mr Miliband with the continuing three-way split in the Liberal Democrats over whether to vote for tuition fees, vote against them or abstain.

On top of that, he had the leaked critique by Bank of England governor Mervyn King describing Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne as "out of their depth."

Yet Mr Miliband chose instead to base his attack on another leaked document in which William Hague had described himself, Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne as 'Thatcher's children.'

"I would rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," the Prime Minister responded, ramming home the open goal to hoots of laughter from the government benches.

For Mr Miliband to attack the coalition for its Thatcherite tendencies was politically inept on so many levels it is hard to know where to start.

To begin with, Mrs Thatcher would not even have contemplated some of the things the coalition is doing, particularly in the area of welfare, so the comparison breaks down at the first hurdle.

But the real problem with referencing Margaret Thatcher in contemporary political debate is the wildly differing reactions she still elicits, even 20 years on from her downfall.

Labour's core voters may still regard her as the devil incarnate - but to many of the swing voters the party needs to win back, she was, and remains, a heroine.

Inevitably, the mounting discontent over Ed's slow start has led to continuing speculation that South Shields MP David Miliband might yet get a second shot at the leadership.

For my part, I can't see it. David may have deserved to get the job in September, but his brother's performance since then is in danger of trashing the entire Miliband brand.

It is simply inconceivable to my mind that, charged with finding another new leader at this stage, the party would replace a failed Miliband with….another Miliband.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who should have stood for the job this time round, is surely in pole position to take over should the opportunity arise.

What will probably save Ed Miliband is that Labour doesn't really do leadership assassinations. They knew Michael Foot was going to lose badly in 1983, yet passed up the chance to put Denis Healey into the job instead.

They probably knew Gordon Brown was going to lose in 2010, but again, they failed to move decisively against him.

The big difference, though, between those two leaders and the current one is that while they, at least to begin with, could claim the support of their own MPs, Mr Miliband was foisted on his by the wider party.

And, of course, there was another recent party leader who found himself in exactly that position. His initials were IDS.