Ed Miliband seems to have missed out on those popular few months that even Gordon managed to achieve in the summer of 2007 and has gone straight to the continual leadership crisis stage. Just when Guido thought the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association had got through a successful day of defeating the traitors, Ed’s own guru Maurice Glasman pops up with his Staggers column. The Kray brother lookalike has given Ed two barrels, telling him  “to show some leadership”:

“There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour’s record in all the wrong ways – we didn’t spend too much money, we’ll cut less fast and less far, but we can’t tell you how. But we have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument. We have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition. We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. Ed . . . has not broken through. He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led.”

How is that for gratitude? Ed might want to think twice about who he puts in the Lords next time. If there is a next time…

UPDATE: Glasman ends his article with: “And we all need to show him love and support in return. I’m backing Ed Miliband.” That should smooth feathers over in Ed’s office this afternoon!

UPDATE II: Glasman has a pop at Ed’s ideological and spiritual father too:

“The problem with Brownite political economy is that, even though it was true that a 3% deficit was not excessive in the context of economic growth, it was debt that was growing at the time, rather than the real economy. A vast, sustained expansion in private debt fuelled the financial sector throughout Brown’s tenure as chancellor and then prime minister”.