As they return to Westminster from the conference season, there is one point on which MPs agree: Labour was the biggest loser. After the trauma of Mark Reckless’s defection to Ukip, the Tories unexpectedly recovered and fired up their activists with the belief that they can win next May. The Lib Dems put on a typically stoical display and savoured the prospect of again holding the balance of power. Only Labour returns in worse spirits than when it left.
The triumphalism that last year followed Ed Miliband’s energy price freeze pledge has been replaced, in parts, by despair. “I think we can still win but we don’t deserve to,” one MP told me, lamenting the party’s “total failure” to change the terms of economic debate. After Miliband’s botched conference speech and several polls putting the Tories ahead, some are contemplating emergency intervention. “That ludicrous performance was our ‘Sheffield moment’,” one former minister hoping to instal Alan Johnson as leader tells me, recalling Neil Kinnock’s ill-fated 1992 rally. “My worry was that the Sheffield moment would come during the campaign and it would obviously be too late to change then. He’s done us a favour by giving it to us now.” But he concedes that there is little appetite in the Parliamentary Labour Party for regicide seven months before the general election: “They’re all more worried about their careers and what would happen if it failed.”
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