Just one day after the Times was briefed that David Miliband is considering a return to the front this time next year, he has shown the Labour’s current mediocre front-bench how attacking the government is done, and shown the rank and file membership just what they are missing. He managed to employ a level of maturity in attacking Gordon Brown, and by proxy Ed Balls, that evades “Team GB”:

“But this rancid Bill is not about fairness or affordability. It reeks of politics, the politics of dividing lines that the current Government spent so much time denouncing when they were in Opposition in the dog days of the Brown Administration. It says a lot that within two years it has fallen into the same trap. We all know the style. Invent your own enemy. Spin your campaign to a newspaper editor short on facts – or high on prejudice. “Frame” the debate. But the enemy within is unemployment not the unemployed. And I don’t want to live in a society where we pretend that we can enjoy the good life while our neighbours lose their life chances. It is bad enough to have no economic growth or 420 000 young long term unemployed or rising levels of child poverty or declining levels of social mobility. It is hard to stomach a Government that takes no responsibility for their mistakes.”

David cleverly attacks the government, without attacking the concept of reducing the benefit bill. Something that the other the two Eds continually fail to do. The Prince Across the Water spent the rest of the afternoon pressing the flesh with Labour MPs in the atrium of Portcullis House…

UPDATE:

. @IsabelHardman If he had bothered to shake their hands before he'd be leader of the Labour Party by now. But he was too grand to bother

— Tim Shipman (@ShippersUnbound) January 8, 2013