Does Ed need David back like a hole in the head?

With Labour leading in the opinion polls and the relationship between the Coalition partners growing increasingly fractious, it would be easy to make the assumption that these are good days for Ed Miliband.

And doubtless on a personal level they are, what with him having finally tied the knot with long-standing partner Justine at a ceremony in Nottinghamshire last week.

But as he returns from his short honeymoon this weekend, I suspect that Ed himself will be feeling rather less complacent about his party's prospects.

Any serious analysis of Labour's performance in last month's local and devolved elections suggests it is currently a long way away from being in a position to win power again.

Sure, the party did well in its Northern heartlands, recapturing big city councils like Newcastle after the Lib Dem interregnum – but it made few inroads in the Southern marginals it needs to win back from the Tories.

And as for Scotland and the party's defeat to Alex Salmond's resurgent SNP….well, the less said the better.

One idea increasingly doing the rounds at present is that what Ed really needs, apart from the operation on his adenoids that is due later this summer, is his brother David back on the front bench.

But while the return of the South Shields MP and former Foreign Secretary would certainly make the Shadow Cabinet look more like a government-in-waiting, I wonder if it might ultimately cause more problems than it would solve.

The biggest and most obvious danger would be that David's return in a senior role would invite comparisons between he and his younger brother which would be less-than-flattering to the latter.

Ed Miliband is already being outshone by his namesake Ed Balls, who has taken to the job of opposition like the proverbial duck to water.

But the Shadow Chancellor and Coalition-basher-in-chief is not even popular within his own party, let alone with the wider public, and as such represents no real threat to his leader.

The elder Miliband is a different matter. Not only did a significant number of Shadow Cabinet members support him for the top job, a majority of Labour members did too.

If history is any guide, neither of the Miliband brothers will be the one to lead Labour back to the promised land.

Whenever the party has lost power after a long period in government, it has usually taken several goes before alighting on a leader capable of persuading the electorate to entrust it with power again.

After the fall of the Attlee government in 1951, it took the party 12 years before it found such a leader in Harold Wilson. And after 1979, it had a 15-year wait before Tony Blair came along.

Some think Labour's next Prime Minister is likely to come from the 2010 intake - with Stella Creasy and Chuka Umunna the names most frequently mentioned - although for my part I wouldn't write off class of '97 alumnus Yvette Cooper just yet.

Either way, if David Miliband isn't going to come back onto the front bench, it calls into question why he is still in the House of Commons at all.

For all his genuinely heartfelt commitment to the people of South Shields, he is a big politician who demands a big stage for his next political role.

The trouble is that, whether David likes it or not, there are still a lot of people around who would dearly like his next role to be that of leader of the Labour Party in his brother's stead.

And so long as that remains the case, the odds must be on him staying where he is.

Opponents come to aid of Great Survivor

The story is often told of the new MP who remarked on what a pleasure it was to look across the Chamber into the eyes of his enemies. The old sweat next to him responded: "No laddie, they are your opponents; your enemies are behind you."

Never was this hoary old adage more true than in the case of the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke.

Like Tony Blair, Denis Healey and Rab Butler before him, Mr Clarke has always been one of those politicians who are more popular outside their own parties than they are in them.

There can be absolutely no doubt that had Mr Blair been up against Mr Clarke in either of the 2001 or 2005 elections, his majorities would have been significantly smaller. But the Tory Party might also have split in two.

As we have seen this week, Mr Clarke continues to divide opinion. Many on his own side – not to mention the right-wing tabloid press – would not have been at all displeased to see him lose his job over his comments on rape.

By contrast, it was instructive to see the conscience of liberal Britain,
Shami Chakrabarti, passing up the opportunity to twist the knife in Mr Clarke when they appeared alongside eachother on the BBC's Question Time on Thursday.

But it was not Shami who ultimately saved him, but a much more obvious 'opponent' - Labour leader Ed Miliband.

The moment Mr Miliband urged David Cameron to sack Mr Clarke over the Commons Despatch Box on Wednesday, it became virtually for the Prime Minister to do so.

My initial reading of this was that it was a smart piece of politics by the often under-rated Mr Miliband.

Keeping Mr Clarke in the government is, after all, in Labour's interests - firstly because, because he exacerbates the divisions between Mr Cameron and his backbenchers, and secondly because the policy agenda he is pursuing is not so very different from Labour's own.

Others might argue that this is way too Machiavellian for the young opposition leader, and that Mr Miliband was simply showing his inexperience.

Either way, the man who has become the great survivor of British politics lives to fight another day.

There is much less confidence this weekend in the future of Mr Clarke's Lib Dem Cabinet colleague, Chris Huhne.

Essex police are now formally investigating claims that he asked someone close to him to take some speeding penalty points he allegedly incurred in 2003 before he became an MP.

Mr Huhne has described the claims as 'inaccurate' but his denials seem to be cutting little ice with some colleagues.

One Lib Dem insider was quoted as saying on Thursday: "The conventional wisdom is that Huhne will end up having to go. He is being highly reckless in taking it to the wire like this. Chris clearly doesn't think they will find the evidence. He wants to brazen it out. He is brazen. That's what he does."

The departure of Mr Huhne would doubtless have a further destabilising impact on the Coalition, already under strain as a result of the AV referendum debacle.

Under the terms of the Coalition agreement, he would have to be replaced by another Lib Dem, with Ed Davey, Jeremy Browne and Norman Lamb among the potential candidates

Meanwhile more able Tories in the ministerial middle-ranks would once again be forced to wait their turn, as was the case when David Laws was defenestrated after just 17 days in office.

Maybe that is one of the reasons some of them were so keen to see the back of Mr Clarke.

Is Ed Miliband the man to inject some passion back into our politics?

One of the most frequent criticisms made of politicians these days is that they spend too much time agreeing with eachother.

For many, politics has become too risk-averse, a game fought over a narrow strip of ideological terrain in which the most important rule is to avoid saying or doing anything that might offend the fabled 'floating voter.'

In truth, it's an analysis that is only half-right. If you're lucky enough to be in government, or if the tide of public opinion is shifting in your direction, there is still a fair degree of scope for radical thought.

But that's not, by and large, true for opposition politicians. Here, the watchword is "don't frighten the horses," and oppositions which have tried to challenge the political consensus, such as Labour in 1983 and the Tories in 2001, have tended to come unstuck.

So in one sense, it was refreshing to see Labour leader Ed – or is it Edward? - Miliband address last weekend's protest rally in central London against the Coalition's spending cuts.

It was absolutely inevitable that he would be crucified in the right-wing press for doing so, particularly once the protests got hijacked by criminal elements which were nothing to do with either the Labour Party or the organisers.

Some in his own party even joined in, with disgruntled Blairites muttering that "Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never went on protest rallies."

If this comparison was somehow supposed to diminish Ed Miliband in the eyes of the voters, I suspect that it will actually have had the opposite effect.

Like many in the upper reaches of the Labour Party, Mr Miliband has in the past come across as something of a machine politician – a man whose career progressed seamlessly from university to researcher to special adviser to MP to Cabinet minister and finally to the party leadership without the intervention of anything resembling real life.

So the fact that he sounded, for the first time last weekend, like a leader of genuine passion and conviction is, for me, a point in his favour.

Sure, it's a gamble, particularly if the passions and convictions he is articulating turn out not to be shared by a majority of voters.

But there is just a chance that the country, bored by years of 'Blatcherite' policy clones fighting over the 'centre ground,' could warm to a leader who seems prepared to inject some genuine political idealism into our national life.

Two substantive charges have been made against Mr Miliband over his Hyde Park speech last Saturday.

The first was that he claimed to be speaking for the 'mainstream' when he wasn't – but David Cameron and George Osborne are perhaps a little too eager to dismiss people's concerns about the cuts – and the possibility that the Labour leader might be genuinely reflecting them.

The second, more serious charge is that Mr Miliband told us "there is an alternative" without actually saying what it is.

But this, too, is slightly disingenuous. As I wrote last week, Labour has fairly consistently said throughout the last election and beyond that it would aim to halve the deficit in four years – a difference of about £40bn in spending terms from what the Coalition is doing.

What the Tories really mean by the latter criticism is that Mr Miliband should tell us which cuts he agrees with rather than allowing voters to be given the impression he opposes all of them.

Here they are on slightly stronger ground. Although Mr Miliband specifically denies he is against all the cuts, he can be seen to be guilty of trying to have it both ways in this regard.

Sooner rather than later, the Labour leader will have to answer this point if he is to become a genuinely credible contender for power at the next general election.

But for now, the fact that he is starting to discover his own distinctive voice will surely stand him in good stead.

Steady as she goes Budget leaves dividing lines unchanged

A little late due to stuff I won't bore you with...but here's my take on the Budget as published in Saturday's Journal.

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Over the past 18 months, throughout the 2010 general election campaign and beyond, the main point at issue in British politics has been the question of how far and how fast to the cut the country's budget deficit.

To begin with, the Tories had the better of that argument, which is essentially why they ended up as the largest single party last May and why we now have a Conservative-led Coalition government.

Because the public blamed Gordon Brown for the scale of the problem, and perceived him as having been in denial over it, the Tories were able to win backing for a much deeper package of cuts than Labour had proposed.

But latterly, doubts have crept in. We may not have ended up in the dreaded double-dip recession, but as anyone running a small or medium-sized business will know, the fabled green shoots of recovery have thus far been very slow to appear.

For all the differences of emphasis between the former Chancellor Alistair Darling and the current Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Labour's position on the deficit remains essentially unchanged.

It is that cutting too far, too fast, will damage growth – a view that is now starting to be borne out by the actual growth figures as well as in the everyday experiences of people up and down the country.

So the political imperative for Chancellor George Osborne as he delivered his second Budget on Wednesday was clear: to demonstrate that the coalition is not just about cuts, but has a growth strategy too.

In this he was only partially successful, his task being made all the more difficult by the need to announce – less than five minutes into his statement - a downgrading of the economic growth forecasts for 2011 from 2.1pc to 1.7pc.

Labour leader Ed Miliband's obvious glee at this announcement – "every time he comes to this House growth is downgraded" he told MPs - is scarcely misplaced, given the thrust of his party's economic message over the past year.

It is also fair to say that as a 'Budget for Growth,' Wednesday's package was somewhat underwhelming.

Sure, the 1p cut in fuel duty, coupled with the cancellation of the planned 4p rise later this year, will provide a fillip for hard-pressed businesses which have seen their profit-margins eroded by ever-escalating fuel costs, as will the additional 1p cut in Corporation Tax.

And the creation of 21 new Enterprise Zones, including the Tees Valley and Tyneside, represents a welcome recognition that some part of the country are being hit far harder by the cuts than others - even it looks suspiciously like a re-run of what Margaret Thatcher's government tried in the 1980s.

But those measures apart, this was actually rather a dull Budget – much more a case of "steady as she goes" than the kind of political game-changer which Chancellors usually like to spring on us.

Perhaps the most significant paragraph in Mr Osborne's statement was the one in which he signalled the eventual scrapping of the 50p top rate of tax, drawing a line under the Brown era and pointing to his longer-term ambitions as a tax-cutter in the Nigel Lawson mould.

Meanwhile the key political dividing lines remain unchanged – the Coalition claiming its radical deficit-reduction strategy will ultimately deliver stronger growth, Labour maintaining that it has merely delayed any prospect of real recovery.

At the moment, the economic evidence is favouring Labour. But with another four years for the green shoots to flower before it has to face the electorate again, the Coalition has time on its side.

Labour has future of electoral system in its hands

When Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg took the historic gamble of joining the Tory-led coalition government last May, he created for himself an excruciating political conundrum.

By forcing the Conservatives to grant a referendum on reforming the voting system, Mr Clegg opened up the tantalising prospect of turning the Lib Dems from a party of permanent opposition to one of moreorless permanent power.

Yet at the same time, by aligning himself with what was bound to be an unpopular administration, Mr Clegg simultaneously ran the risk of seeing the prize of electoral reform swept away on a tide of anti-government protest votes.

The fact that he then went on to make himself the most hated man in Britain in some quarters by breaking a 'solemn promise' on university tuition fees only served to underline the point.

For make no mistake, Mr Clegg is set to become the central figure in the May referendum that was finally given the go-ahead this week following a last-minute game of parliamentary ping-pong between the Lords and Commons.

At the moment, the 'no' campaign is not talking about him, trying instead to make the argument against the proposed new Alternative Vote system on the grounds of cost and complexity.

But don't be fooled – these are just the opening skirmishes, and before too long, this is going to get personal.

'Don't give Nick Clegg a permanent seat at the Cabinet table' is quite simply the no camp's most potent message in this campaign, and it's one we will be hearing a lot more of in the run up to the 5 May vote.

Perhaps understandably, Mr Clegg has so far been nowhere to be seen in the 'yes' campaign, even going so far as to tell Radio Four's Today programme yesterday that the referendum was "nothing to do with" him.

Instead, in the week that The King's Speech swept the board at the Baftas, the pro-reform camp wheeled out the film's much-decorated stars Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter to voice their support.

While Ms Bonham Carter, as the great grand-daughter of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, does at least have some family political tradition to maintain here, one could be forgiven for asking 'who cares?'

But that is not the point. The point is that here are two high-profile personalities supporting electoral reform whose names are not Nick Clegg.

On the Labour side, several prominent ex-ministers have already got involved on the 'no' side, including John Prescott, whose track record in referendum campaigns should probably make opponents of electoral reform somewhat wary.

But what should Labour supporters of AV like party leader Ed Miliband do – stay out of it and let the luvvies do the talking, or seek to provide a measure of leadership themselves?

In a sense, it's a win-win situation for Mr Miliband. If the referendum results in a 'yes' vote, the evidence of recent elections suggests it will benefit his party.

But if the country votes 'no', the coalition will be destabilised, perhaps even to the extent that an early general election could result.

The attitude of the Labour leadership will ultimately be crucial, in that it will almost certainly be Labour voters who decide the outcome of this.

Conservative supporters will by and large vote to keep first past the post, as David Cameron urged yesterday. The Lib Dems will vote en masse for change.

The great temptation will be for Labour supporters to vote tribally against AV in order to give the Coalition a bloody nose, but given a strong enough lead from Mr Miliband, my hunch is that most of them will back the change.

That is, of course, assuming they can overcome their dislike of Nick Clegg.

The tough task facing Brown's children

As Sir John Chilcott's Inquiry into the war in Iraq continued to chip away at Tony Blair's historical reputation this week, another of the former Prime Minister's closest allies took his leave of frontline politics.

Amid difficulties in his private life that will surely elicit widespread sympathy, Alan Johnson became the latest in a long line of key players from the Blair Years to depart the political stage.

Looked at in terms of Labour kremlinology, the erstwhile Shadow Chancellor's surprise resignation, and his replacement by Ed Balls, means the Brownite takeover of the party is now all but complete.

Mr Balls, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander were all denied Cabinet promotion by Mr Blair – but they now occupy the four most senior roles on the Labour frontbench.

But in this lies the nub of Labour's problem as it seeks to come to terms with opposition and put itself back into credible contention for government.

For as time goes on, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the general election result last May was not just a repudiation of Gordon Brown personally, but of much of what he stood for politically.

There are increasing signs that, like 1979, 2010 could come to be seen as a watershed election, a moment in history which saw a paradigm shift away from the top-down, statist brand of politics with which Mr Brown was associated.

That is certainly the way the Coalition would like us to see it, which is why the proposed reforms to the National Health Service announced this week are so central to its overall political strategy.

The reforms are certainly not without risk for Prime Minister David Cameron. With the possible exception of Coronation Street, the NHS remains Britain's best-loved institution and politicians tinker with it at their peril.

Not the least of Mr Cameron's difficulties, as Alastair Campbell pointed out on Question Time on Thursday night, is that he has no electoral mandate for it.

But the voters tend to be rather less worried about private vs public arguments in public service provision than politicians - and political commentators for that matter – tend to be.

And as long as the service improves in time for the next election – as it may well do once the dust has settled – it could even turn into a vote-winner.

The risk for Labour, on this and other issues, is that it finds itself stranded on the wrong side of a political tide – much as it did in the early 1980s as Margaret Thatcher's free-market revolution forged ahead.

Of all the blows that the Coalition has landed on Mr Miliband since he became Labour leader, none was more telling than Mr Cameron's "I'd rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown."

In truth, Ed Miliband was really only ever an adopted son. The true son of Gordon, the one who was by his side in all his most important decisions, was Mr Balls.

Sure, the combative new Shadow Chancellor will give as good as he gets, but it is already clear that the Coalition will exploit his closeness to the former Prime Minister to the limit.

On the surface, Balls for Johnson looks like a good exchange for Labour – a brilliant economist and pugnacious operator for a Mr Nice Guy who seemed out of his depth in the Treasury brief.

But the whole reason Mr Johnson was appointed to the role in the first place was precisely because he had no economic baggage.

The Coalition's key success since the election has been to pin the blame for the cuts on Labour's mismanagement of the economy and to fix this in the public's mind.

Mr Balls, of all people, is going to have his work cut out to reverse that perception.

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.

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.

Ed Miliband needs to reform his party first

With his leadership of the Labour Party still barely two months old, it did not take long for talk of plots against Ed Miliband to start crawling out of the Westminster woodwork.

One national daily informed us that David Miliband was standing ready to take over should his younger brother prove a flop in the job he so narrowly beat him to in September.

I doubt very much whether David had anything to do with this 'story.' Indeed, many more stories like it and the South Shields MP will probably have to quit politics altogether, rather than risk becoming a focus for discontent over his brother's leadership.

No, I suspect this story arose, as these things tend to do at Westminster, from a Labour MP speculating idly to a journalist about what might happen if Ed Miliband were to fall under a bus.

But the story was not completely without significance. It demonstrated that some Labour MPs remain far from convinced by Ed, and that the new leader still has a big job on his hands to unite his party.

In that respect, his return from paternity leave at the start of this week came not a moment too soon.

Mr Miliband's announcement on his first day back of wholesale review of Labour policies is a wise move as far as it goes.

Barring an irretrievable bust-up if next May's referendum on the voting system goes against the Lib Dems, the coalition is likely to be in power for five years, and there is thus plenty of time for Labour to reinvent itself.

Furthermore, it is a tactic that has worked successfully for the last two Leaders of the Opposition who have managed to be promoted out of that job into Number Ten – Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Both men used policy reviews as a means of detoxifying their parties in the eyes of voters, Mr Blair from its tax-and-spend image, Mr Cameron from its 'nasty party' tag.

But it doesn't always work. Neil Kinnock launched a similarly wide-ranging review in the 1980s called 'Meet the Challenge, Make the Change', but failed to convince the electorate that Labour had done.

Likewise William Hague's much-vaunted 'Common Sense Revolution' in 1999 served only to reinforce voter perceptions of the Tories at that time as shrill and extremist.

For me, the fate of those two leaders seems to sum up the real difficulty facing Ed Miliband – whether he has the personality to connect with the British public and project a new and compelling vision of what his party stands for.

This is what ultimately distinguishes the successful opposition leaders from those who ultimately failed to make the transition to government.

Personality aside, his other big problem is whether the party under him can forge a distinctive policy agenda that is neither Old nor New Labour

For all the talk of the "death" of New Labour, and its replacement by True Labour, Real Labour or Next Labour, any departure from it will inevitably be portrayed as 'Red Ed' lurching to the left.

If anything, Mr Miliband needs to try to out-modernise the previous generation of modernisers by being prepared to tackle issues which they ultimately shied away from.

Welfare reform is one obvious example, but so is reform of the party's own archaic structures and its absurd system of electing its leaders.

It would be a brave politician indeed who, having prospered under the electoral college system, would then advocate its replacement by one member, one vote.

But if Mr Miliband is looking for a 'Clause Four Moment' which will force the electorate to sit up and take notice of him, that could well be the best option.

Ed should think twice before he buries New Labour

Within hours of Ed Miliband's victory in the Labour leadership election last Saturday, friends of Tony Blair let it be known that the former PM regarded the result as a "disaster."

It was certainly pretty disastrous for Tony Blair. His ill-judged intervention in the contest, suggesting that any departure from New Labour would consign the party to the wilderness, appears to have spectacularly backfired.

Offered the chance to choose a Blairite continuity candidate in David Miliband, the comrades opted instead for someone who has spent most of his career as an adviser to Gordon Brown.

Mr Blair's autobiography may have topped the best-seller charts. But it has lost him any lingering influence he may have had over his old party.

But if this week's conference in Manchester was a disaster for the Blairites, how was it for the party as a whole?

Well, on this point, I'm afraid I find myself in rare agreement with the former Prime Minister.

Had David won, Labour would have been right back in the game. Unlike his younger brother, he is a man who is ready to be Prime Minister now, and his election would instantly have struck fear into the coalition.

Instead - and not for the first time in its history - the party has opted to eschew the easy route back to power in favour of the long, hard road.

To my mind, there are three principal reasons why Ed's victory may ultimately come to be seen as a bad day's work for the party.

The first is nothing to do with the qualities of Ed or David, but with the flawed system that enabled Ed to come out on top despite winning fewer votes from both party members and MPs.

Much has already been written about the dangers of Ed being seen to be in the "pockets" of the union bosses, and like many Labour leaders before him, he will have to work hard to tackle that perception.

To me, the bigger problem is not that the unions got their man, but that the party members didn't, creating an issue of legitimacy that Ed will struggle to address.

Secondly, there is Ed himself. He was right in his speech on Tuesday to try to draw a line under some of the issues which have caused Labour to suffer such a catastrophic loss of trust, and the 'Red Ed' jibes will soon be shown to be ludicrous.

But for all his personal ruthlessness in fighting his elder brother for the party leadership – and in despatching Nick Brown from the job of Chief Whip - he still comes across as rather earnest and well-meaning.

For me, though, the biggest danger for Ed is that, in displaying such ruthlessness in pursuit of the top job, he may have sown the seeds of his own downfall.

It is not just that in order to win the leadership he had to humiliate his elder brother and force him out of frontline politics, but that he also had to trash the entire New Labour brand.

Yes, there were things New Labour got wrong. It did become "fixed in its own certainties" as Ed said on Tuesday. The Blairites became, like Tony Crosland, revisionists who stopped revising.

And as the North-East knows only too well, it clearly failed to balance the interests of its traditional supporters against those of 'aspirational' voters.

But the essential lesson of New Labour – that to win, the party needs to reach out beyond its ideological comfort zone - is one Ed Miliband ignores at his peril.

And I am not alone in wondering whether in declaring New Labour 'dead,' he is not also in danger of writing his own political obituary.

Mutually assured destruction

Behind all the brave talk of new generations, it is my fairly considered view that this Labour conference has been little short of a disaster for the party.

The outcome of the leadership election, via a flawed system that appears to have awarded the prize to the less popular, as well as the less experienced brother, has overshadowed the whole week in Manchester.

Had David Miliband won, as once seemed his appointed destiny, then the week would surely have been a breeze.

Labour would have elected an oven-ready Prime Minister who would instantly have struck fear into the coalition. Instead, the party has opted to do it the hard way.

As I have written before, I don't think Ed Miliband's politics are the problem. He was right yesterday to have distanced himself from some of the issues which caused Labour to suffer such a catastrophic loss of trust at the last two elections, and the 'Red Ed' jibs of the right-wing press will soon be shown to be self-evidently ludicrous.

Another of his nicknames, 'Forrest Gump', is perhaps nearer the mark. The trouble with Ed for me is that, for all his personal ruthlessness in fighting his elder brother for the party leadership and humiliating him in the process, he still comes across as rather well-meaning and naive.

To the Blarites, he was neither Red Ed, nor Forrest Gump, but 'The Emissary from the Planet Fuck' - apparently a reference to the fact that he was the only leading Brownite they could speak to without being told to "fuck off."

This too is revealing. Ed Miliband effectively won this contest by being the acceptable face of Brownism - by contrast with Ed Balls who was seen as its unacceptable face.

But the real problem Ed has faced this week is the psychological outworking of his brother's humiliation, culminating in today's announcement that he will not serve under him.

It undoubtedly leaves Ed weakened, and leaves Labour's already depleted top team looking even more bereft of experience, but it is merely the price he is now having to pay for upsetting the natural order of things.

Ed should perhaps have given more thought to this before he entered a contest which he did not really need to enter - that in destroying his brother, he risked ultimately destroying himself.

This self-destruction is not just a matter of whether Ed can look himself in the mirror at 3am in the morning, but whether, in laying bare the divisions within Labour in order to grab the top job, he has ultimately fatally hobbled his own election chances.

It was for all these reasons, and also partly because Ed's victory has left me feeling rather disconnected from Labour, that I posted a picture of Yvette Cooper on this blog last night under the headline "Labour's next Prime Minister."

Okay, so five years is a long time in politics, and Ed will doubtless grow in stature during that time, but in the increasingly presidential nature of our election contests, he doesn't look or sound to me like a man who could beat David Cameron.

So Dave is in for two (fixed) terms, Labour will turn to someone else for 2020, and Yvette - who in my view could have won this time and spared us this whole psychodrama - will surely make Chuka Umunna wait a while longer.

It is surprising in many ways that we have not yet had a second woman Prime Minister. The 30th anniversary of Thatcher's overthrow would seem an appopriate year in which to remedy that.

As Ed sets out his stall....here's Labour's next Prime Minister

Balls holds the key

Politics has seen many changes over the past couple of decades - but if there is one thing that has changed out of all recognition, it is the science of opinion polling.

I have been in this game just about long enough to remember the infamous BBC exit poll in 1987 predicting a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher's Tories won a 102-seat majority.

By contrast, this year's exit poll - also predicting a hung Parliament - was very nearly spot-on, not just in terms of the overall outcome but also in terms of the number of seats won by each party.

But if most elections are becoming easier to predict, Labour leadership election are surely the exception that proves the rule.

There are two fairly straightforward reasons for this. Firstly, the single transferable voting system, which usually means that contests are decided on voters' second and sometimes even third preferences.

Secondly, the make-up of Labour's electoral college, comprising MPs, trade unions, and party members, which makes it nigh-on impossible to conduct a meaningful opinion poll.

So the widespread expectation that South Shields MP David Miliband will be crowned as Gordon Brown's successor later this month needs to be taken, at the very least, with a small pinch of salt.

While the Shadow Foreign Secretary certainly has the most support among MPs, and probably among party members, no-one quite knows what the union ballots will come up with, or how important those second preferences will prove to be.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, they only have to look at what happened in the party's deputy leadership election in 2007, when Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn were seen as favourites by the pundits.

They completely underestimated the level of support among the grassroots for Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas, whose second preference votes ultimately won Ms Harman the job.

That said, leadership elections are not the same as deputy leadership elections where you might feel more able to vote for someone you like the sound of, without necessarily worrying about whether they are capable of winning a general election.

There is a good argument for saying that if the same six candidates as contested the deputy leadership in 2007 had been contesting the leadership, Mr Johnson would have won.

The conventional wisdom in this election has been that Ed Miliband is everyone's second favourite candidate, and that if David is not sufficiently far enough ahead on first preferences, he risks being overhauled by his brother in the latter stages.

The key to it, as with the 2007 deputy leadership election, will be what happens to the second preferences of the third-placed candidate.

Following his strong performance in bashing the coalition, and showing real fighting qualities over the course of the campaign, I think this will in all likelihood be Ed Balls.

I am quite sure this is why talk of a 'pact' under which Mr Balls would become David Miliband's Shadow Chancellor has been doing the rounds over the past couple of weeks.

As it is, I am not sure there ever was such a pact or whether it would even be deliverable.

Mr Balls and the elder Miliband do not appear to share the same views about the importance of tackling the deficit vis-à-vis the need for economic growth, and that may make his appointment as Shadow Chancellor somewhat problematical.

Either way, by my reckoning Ed Miliband will probably need to win at least three fifths of Mr Balls' transfers in order to pip his brother to the post.

My hunch is that he won't, and that it will indeed be David wearing the crown a fortnight tomorrow.

For PM, it has to be DM

No leadership election occurs in a political vacuum. For good or ill, the current race for the leadership of the Labour Party will invariably be shaped in part by the context in which it is taking place.

Like it or not, it is the Blair-Brown years, and their ultimately shattering denouement in the general election defeat of 6 May, which provide the inescapable backdrop to this contest.

For at least one of the candidates, Ed Balls, that defeat already looks likely to have dealt a terminal blow to his leadership aspirations.

For all his pugnacious qualities - none of the candidates have landed as many blows on the Lib-Con coalition as he has - the party was never going to replace the defeated Gordon Brown with, well, Gordon Brown Mark II.

But if this has been a difficult election in which to be a Brownite - all the candidates have been anxious to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the former Prime Minister - being seen as a Blairite is not much of a recommendation either.

If by publishing his memoirs in the week the leadership ballot papers went out, Tony Blair hoped to influence the contest in favour of his protege David Miliband, it only goes to show how delusional he has become.

Mr Blair's account of his 'Journey' is already a bestseller, but many Labour members will be aghast at his decision to kick Mr Brown when he is down while simultaneously refusing to criticise Prime Minister David Cameron.

Then again, why would he, since he too clearly believes that the coalition is a Blairite continuity administration, doing exactly the things he would have done had he not been thwarted by nasty old Gordon.

So far from boosting the elder Miliband's candidature, the book looks likely to provoke a backlash against Mr Blair which could well harm the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

But in my view, that would be a shame, because, aside from all the factionalism, David Miliband is the best qualified candidate to take Labour back into government.

I have to confess that at the outset of this contest, I was leaning more towards Andy Burnham, which would have been the first time Durham North MP Kevan Jones and I had agreed about anything.

But while Mr Burnham is clearly the candidate most attuned to the needs of the North, his oddly tribal, Old Labour-ish campaign has seemed at odds with the 'new politics' of co-operation and coalition.

Of the other candidates, Ed Balls has already been dealt with, Diane Abbot would clearly take Labour back to irrelevance, while I wonder whether Ed Miliband is really ready for the top job.

I like a lot of what he has had to say about the need for Labour to regain its values before it can think of regaining power, and the 'Red Ed' jibes from the Blairite camp are self-evidently ludicrous.

For me, Ed's problem is not his politics, but the fact that he comes across as rather well-meaning and naive - a nice guy, an original thinker even, but not quite tough enough to be leader - and maybe PM - just yet.

By contrast, the one quality his elder brother possesses above all is that, having already held a major office of state, you can easily imagine him as Prime Minister now.

Mr Blair was at pains in his TV interview with Andrew Marr on Wednesday to stress that the South Shields MP is his own man, and that is one thing he was right about.

As a North-East Blairite, he could easily have got sucked into the silly tribalism that affected some of his former parliamentary colleagues in the region who saw any criticism of their beloved leader as a betrayal, but to his credit he never did.

I have no doubt at all that if he wins, David's first priority will be to unite the party and draw a line under the feuding once and for all.

But will he win? That is the question to which I will turn my attentions in next week's column.

How open is the Labour Party to persuasion?

Cross-posted from Political Betting.

Early on in the Labour leadership battle, Mike [Smithson] drew what I thought was potentially a good analogy between David Cameron’s succesful campaign for the Tory leadership in 2005 and Andy Burnham’s candidature for Labour this time round.

Young Burnham, he surmised, could turn out to be the Cameron of this campaign - a relative unknown coming from behind to win while better-known front-runners faltered.

As it is, Burnham has hardly achieved lift-off. He has fought an oddly Old Labour sort of campaign, of which the last straw - no pun intended, Jack - has been his opposition to the proposed AV referendum which Labour supported in its manifesto.

But that’s not my main point. My question is: is there actually room in this race for any of the candidates to ‘do a Cameron,’ or is the nature of the contest such that the prospect of anyone springing a surprise is already closed-off?

One major difference between this and the Tories’ 2005 race is that the candidates are not being subjected to the pressure-cauldron of a party conference hustings.

When the Tories did this, it enabled them to weed-out a front-runner in David Davis who, whatever his other virtues, was clearly incapable of making a decent platform speech, in favour of someone who wowed his audience by speaking without notes.

Another key difference is the nature of the two parties. As I have pointed out on my own blog, the Tories are historically much more open to making unexpected choices of leader - Margaret Thatcher over Ted Heath in ‘75, William Hague over Ken Clarke in ‘97, Iain Duncan Smith over the same opponent in 2001.

Labour, by contrast, almost always sticks to the front-runner, sometimes because the front-runner is clearly the best candidate (Neil Kinnock in 1983, Tony Blair in 1994) but sometimes out of sentimentality or a resdual belief in ‘Buggins’ Turn.’

My hunch is that most of Labour’s electorate has already made its mind up about this election, and it is now a contest between the brothers. While it is not yet clear which of them will win, it is clear that one of them will.

I’m not sure what current prices are available on Burnham, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott, but whatever they are, my candid advice to PB aficionados would be: ignore them.

Troubled times for Clegg and Co

After the initial thrill of seeing Liberal bums occupying ministerial seats for the first time since the wartime coalition of the 1940s, the past couple of months have proved something of a reality-check for Britain's third party.

First, there was the loss of their rising star David Laws from the coalition Cabinet after just 16 days following revelations in the Daily Telegraph about his expense claims and his private life.

Then the Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, was forced to do a Robin Cook and swiftly dump his wife for his mistress after their affair was exposed by the News of the World.

Mr Huhne kept his job, although conspiracy theorists would doubtless see a pattern in this double embarrassment for key Liberal Democrats at the hands of Tory-supporting newspapers.

But of course, the unease currently being felt across Nick Clegg's party is not just about the personal difficulties of individual Lib Dem ministers. It goes much deeper than that.

The first two months of the coalition have been dominated by the Tory 'cuts' agenda, with Chancellor George Osborne emerging as the dominant figure in the government much as Gordon Brown did under Tony Blair.

For the Lib Dems, it has meant the humiliation of being forced to eat their pre-election words, when they warned that cutting too deep, too fast could cause another recession.

More and more grassroots Lib Dems, and even some of the party's more left-leaning MPs, have started to ask the question: What's in this for us?

Well, this week came the answer – news that a referendum on changing the voting system from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote is to be held next year, probably on 5 May.

For Deputy Prime Minister Mr Clegg, who will formally announce the move next week, it represents perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime chance to achieve the Lib Dem Holy Grail of electoral reform.

There are strong practical arguments for having the vote this early on in the Parliament, in that if it were held any later there would be little chance of getting any changes through in time for the next election.

Against that, though, is the obvious danger that it could shorten the coalition's life by about four years if the referendum is lost.

Were that to happen, of course, there would be little incentive left for the Lib Dems to remain in the government, and Mr Clegg would come under pressure from his party to obtain a swift divorce.

This might, in turn, provide a perverse incentive for the Conservatives not to campaign too hard against the change to AV, although premier David Cameron has insisted that he will.

The referendum poses a dilemma for Labour, too. The logic of opposition suggests it is in their interests to get a 'no' vote in order to try to bring down the government and force a 2011 election.

But many Labour MPs favour AV, and both Miliband brothers have made clear the party will campaign for a 'yes' vote if they win the leadership.

Whether or not Mr Clegg succeeds in his ambition will depend at least in part on whether the coalition can retain the broad popular support it currently holds.

As the North-East knows all too well, referenda held at a time when the government is unpopular tend to result in resounding 'no' votes.

The biggest danger for the 'yes' campaign is that the public comes to view this as an irrelevance when set against the economic problems facing the country – as many Tory MPs already do.

Not for the first time in recent months, the Lib Dems are finding themselves having to negotiate uncharted – and shark-infested – political waters.

Miliband Major has the Big Mo

The Con-Lib coalition overcame its first major crisis over the past week with the resignation of the Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws after what must be the shortest Cabinet career on record.

Doubtless it is a huge loss to the government. Mr Laws was easily the most popular Lib Dem on the Tory benches, and as such was a vital bridge between the two governing parties.

That said, it says a lot for the strength of David Cameron and Nick Clegg's alliance that Mr Laws' shock departure, after revelations about his expense claims and his private life, failed to sever it.

Although there do appear to have been some behind-the-scenes disagreements about how the resignation should be managed – and how Mr Laws should be replaced – in public at least the coalition managed to maintain a united front.

Debate will linger on over whether Mr Laws was right to resign, although my own feelings are that he made the right call in judging that he could not be the man to oversee expenditure cuts having claimed expenses he was not entitled to.

But after a month of writing mainly about the coalition, I'm going to focus instead this week at what is happening on the opposite side of the House.

Granted, Labour's leadership race hasn't exactly sprung into life yet, with most of the better-known contenders ruling themselves out on the grounds of age and the current front-runners a monochrome set of white, middle-class former policy wonks.

But with a swift return to power a real possibility for Labour if the coalition were to hit the buffers, the choice is certainly not without significance.

Many Labour activists in the North-East will doubtless be hoping South Shields MP David Miliband can emulate Tony Blair and Ramsay Macdonald and become the third party leader to hold a seat in the region.

History is certainly on his side. While the Tories are often inclined to favour the unexpected in their choice of leader, Labour almost invariably opts for the most 'obvious' candidate.

It usually pays off, too. Harold Wilson over George Brown in 1963, Jim Callaghan over Michael Foot in 1976, John Smith over Bryan Gould in 1992 and Tony Blair over Margaret Beckett in 1994 were all the right choices.

As if to prove the point, on the one occasion on which Labour passed over the obvious successor - choosing Mr Foot over Denis Healey in 1981 – it proved a disaster.

Support for the six candidates among the North-East's 25 Labour MPs is fairly evenly spread.

David Miliband currently has six nominations from the region, Ed Balls five, Ed Miliband four, and the other three candidates one each.

While left-wingers Diane Abbott and John McDonnell appear unlikely to get the 33 nominations necessary to join Mr Balls and the Milibands on the ballot paper, former health secretary Andy Burnham still might.

The one North-East MP backing him thus far is Durham North's Kevan Jones, who is not a bad person to have on your side in an internal party election.

Ed Miliband began the contest looking handily-placed, potentially the most open to fresh ideas and the least weighed-down by previous baggage. Mr Balls meanwhile is a proven campaigner who is sure to get big support from the unions.

But it is the elder Miliband who appears to have that crucial electoral asset: momentum.

Most of the heavyweights from the Brown Cabinet have lined-up behind him and as well as being the most experienced of the candidates, he both looks and sounds the most Prime Ministerial.

It is early days – but the Labour leadership is already looking like it is David Miliband's to lose.