Wanting a truly measured overview of the Labour leadership candidates and our choices? Then click here and prepare to be enlightened:
The YouGov poll [£] in today’s Sunday Times puts Ed Miliband very narrowly ahead of his brother, due to a big swing among trade union members. Among the general public, though, things are different.30% of voters think David Miliband would make the best leader, 16% think Ed and 54% don’t know. The question seems to have excluded the other candidates, but another poll from just over a week ago covered all five. It gave David 19%, Diane Abbott 10%, Ed M 9%, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls 5% each, and 51% don’t know.
There’s obviously no strong public preference: most people know little if anything about the contenders. David Miliband’s profile after three years as Foreign Secretary is still not all that high, reflecting the dominance of the last government by Gordon Brown.
So we’re still painfully short of information about how people think the five come across.
As you may have guessed from my previous post, such carefully weighted considerations – which dogged me for the whole of the first part of the Labour leadership campaign to the extent that I refused even to watch the candidates and compare their performances on video – have fallen dramatically by the wayside today. Presumably, along with my good intentions.
I shall revisit my criteria in the light of Tom’s excellent piece but – in the light of that strange effect representative democracy sometimes has on us – not the emotional surge which finally led me to make up my mind.
My mind is made up even as I procrastinate to the very end.
I never did walk out of any examination before the bell.
