Is Ed Miliband quitting? BBC reporter starts media flap

Labour spin-doctors were battling this afternoon to contain overheated media speculation that Ed Miliband was about to make a statement about his leadership.

The BBC had hacks at Westminster scampering to their smartphones to find out from Miliband’s press team whether he was about to announce his resignation.

The fresh bout of media panic was brought on by a report on Radio 4’s The World at One by reporter Ross Hawkins that Miliband “is going to directly address the criticism of his leadership during a regional visit. That is a decision – ducking this and hoping it will all go away is no longer an option.”

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Nonsense, said the startled Miliband spinners. “What’s actually happening is that Miliband is doing a TV clip on bus regulation on a regional visit,” a Labour source told The Guardian. Team Miliband would not be distracted by "noises off”, the source added.

This guaranteed a massive turnout by the television crews to cover Miliband on the buses in Northampton during an outing that would normally barely attract notice.

Hawkins had spiced up his lunchtime report by saying that at least two Labour MPs had gone to Dave Watts, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to say “Miliband must go”.

Hawkins said: “One normally loyal backbencher told me, ‘I think there has been a sharp downturn in mood over the last few days. Another told me he had been to the chairman of the PLP, Dave Watts, to say Ed Miliband should go and he had been told others had done likewise. This is no longer an entirely private conversation.”

Hawkins said sources had also told him that Ed Miliband’s leadership had been openly discussed at a meeting of Labour MPs from the northwest of England earlier this week and that it came up again last night at a social gathering of the 2010 intake of Labour MPs.

The speculation was fuelled by the editorial in the New Statesman - which I wrote about earlier today - heavily criticising Miliband’s failure to cut through to the lower middle class voters who gave Tony Blair three successive victories.

Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor, helpfully pointed out on BBC TV’s Daily Politics show that “paranoia that comes out of the Miliband camp is so rank that they will invent plots when there are none. The mood is pretty black. Since the party conference, the mood has got blacker.’

Unrest undoubtedly exists among frustrated Labour MPs, but a full-blown leadership coup, with six months to go before the election, remains highly unlikely – mainly because there’s no one putting their hand up to take over.

As for Ed himself, he finally piped up mid-afternoon, telling the BBC:

"This is nonsense. My focus, and the Labour party’s focus, is on the country, and the things that matter to the country. That’s the cost of living crisis, the NHS, it’s the prospects for the next generation. That’s my focus here in Northampton and that’s our focus across the country ...

"There are huge issues that the country faces, issues of why the country doesn’t work for most people. That is what we are determined to change."

Er... not quite the denouement Ross Hawkins had promised us.