After Ed Miliband’s barnstorming performance this week, it’s hardly surprising that the Tory hacks are now searching for the next chink in the armour. ‘Ed doesn’t look like or behave like a leader’ now has to be binned.
So the next complaint, always presented of course as an invitation to help him, is that he needs to ‘take tough decisions’. What that turns out to mean is that he’s got to show he’s prepared to take on his own party (Blair’s dismissal of clause 4 is always quoted as a good precedent) and to ‘defy Left orthodoxy’. How handy – getting a Left leader to show his mettle by castrating himself. What a double whammy – getting him to undercut the loyalty of his own movement and at the same time showing his capacity to sign up to the dirty work of his opponents.
Ed Miliband’s speech to conference this year was excellent. Following on from his speech in Liverpool last year he put yet more distance between himself and New Labour with a commitment to building a fairer Britain and challenging the laissez-faire and indeed “intensely relaxed” attitude to inequality of the Blair years. 
Today, the national minimum wage for workers over the age of 21 rose by 11p, to £6.19 an hour: a rise of 1.8%. To put that into perspective, the cost of living rose by 3.6% in 2011, according to the Consumer Price Index (CPI).