Cameron exploits gossip to knock ‘shambolic’ Miliband

The latest fall in the unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent – its lowest level in more than six years, according to Reuters - gave David Cameron the edge at Prime Minister's Questions today as he traded blows with Ed Miliband over the economy.

But Cameron isn’t banking only on the economy to win him the election: he also focused today on another issue that his team think can have the beating of Miliband - the wally factor.

On the economy, Cameron claimed the ONS figures released this morning prove it’s humming along. He quoted at length the praise from Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, who said in Washington last week that the success of the UK economy "is the sort of result we would like to see" across the rest of the G7.

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Miliband hit back by saying – not for the first time – that this will be the first government since the 1930s to leave office with living standards lower than they were at the beginning, with most families £1,600 worse off.

But the Labour leader failed to point out that despite the general fall in the jobless numbers by 58,000 to a total of 1.9 million, unemployment among young people has actually gone UP by 30,000 to 750,000.

As the BBC’s deputy political editor James Landale suggested on the Daily Politics show, it would have been a salient point for Miliband to raise. His failure to do so perhaps shows his lack of confidence on the economy, even though there is evidence from the latest ICM poll that it may be falling down the list of priorities for voters.

So, what about the wally factor? This is more contentious because the Prime Minister clearly sought to exploit a very questionable and gossipy attack on Miliband that appeared in last week’s Mail on Sunday.

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This was the paper’s serialisation of a memoir by Martin Winter, a former Labour Mayor of Doncaster, who had Miliband to stay at his family house at the request of Gordon Brown in 2005 so he could pursue the Labour nomination for the safe Labour seat of Doncaster North.

Cameron taunted Miliband with the claims made in Winter’s book: "He couldn't open a door, he was bullied by schoolchildren, and set a carpet on fire - just imagine the shambles he would make of running the country."

The Prime Minister knows full well that Winter fell out with the Labour leadership five years ago and therefore had an axe to grind. Cameron will doubtless be attacked in some quarters for belittling PMQs by raising such tittle-tattle.

This election campaign just started to get dirty.