Sunday newspapers give Ed Miliband a ‘hellish’ day

This is proving a “hellish day” for Labour leader Ed Miliband, in the words of the BBC’s Andrew Marr. And the attacks are not just coming from Tory-supporting papers.

One of Labour’s biggest donors has criticised the party’s NHS plans and the mansion tax; Miliband has been described as “isolated” and “haunted” by the editor of a political mag you would normally expect to back him; while the chief executive of Boots says a Labour victory would be a catastrophe.

And all of this comes as, chez Miliband, they’re just getting over an excoriating attack from the playwright David Hare’s in yesterday’s Guardian.

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The party donor: John Mills tells the Mail on Sunday he agrees with the Blairite former Health Secretary Alan Milburn that it is a mistake for Labour to campaign on cutting private sector involvement in NHS care.

“I agree with Milburn – if you look at the Continental model, they have a much greater mix of public and private provision,” says Mills, who is chairman of the consumer good giant JML and funded Labour to the tune of £1.65m in 2013.

Mills also attacks the mansion tax as a way of raising funds for the NHS. “It would be much better to introduce extra council tax bands and spend the money on local needs, such as affordable housing.”

The magazine editor: Jason Cowley, editor of the Left-leaning New Statesman, says the mood of Labour MPs is “not so much one of despair, it’s worse than that – resignation.”

In an article for the Mail on Sunday, he claims a “haunted” Miliband is at war with his campaign chief Douglas Alexander, that Ed Balls “has all but given up on” on the party leader, and that the party “knows it is losing an election that it should be winning, and doesn’t know what to do about it”.

Cowley says Miliband is “decent and intelligent” and could yet scrape home with more seats than the Tories – though not achieve an overall majority – but only thanks to Britain’s voting system which favours Labour.

The business leader: Stefano Pessina, acting chief executive of Boots the Chemists, says a Labour government led by Ed Miliband would be a “catastrophe” for Britain because Labour’s plans are “not helpful for business, not helpful for the country and in the end probably won’t be helpful for them”.

Pessina, talking to the Sunday Telegraph, was not specific about his complaints but was apparently referring to Labour’s dislike of high levels of executive pay, the party’s proposal to restore the 50p top rate of income tax (up from 45p), the energy price freeze and the mansion tax on homes worth more than £2 million. “If they acted as they speak, it would be a catastrophe,” he said.

As the Telegraph reports, it is “exceptionally rare for a business figure as senior as Mr Pessina – whose company employs tens of thousands of people – to be so outspoken so close to a general election”.

The playwright: David Hare, in an essay for The Guardian on Saturday, complained that Labour under Miliband are failing to provide a convincing narrative on a scale bigger even than during Neil Kinnock’s doomed 1992 election campaign.

“Why,” asks the playwright, “at a time when the public needs it, can Ed not speak in a way that reaches the public? Why can he not shoot at Cameron’s open goal?”

The answer is “you can only make a great speech if you have a great analysis” and that’s where Miliband has failed.

Hare’s essay is timed for the revival of The Absence of War, the 1993 play he wrote after enjoying privileged access to Team Kinnock the previous year. The subject? A Labour leader struggling to take advantage of the weakness of the Tory opposition.

“Yes, as everyone keeps telling me, this is indeed a timely moment to revive a play about a floundering Labour leader who can’t find the public pulse,” Hare concluded. “And no, since you ask, I haven’t changed a word.”

Hare wrote: “Underlying the decline of Labour is a comprehensive failure, far deeper than in 1992, to provide a competing narrative, one that makes the public feel that inequity is not the natural condition of man, and that the mid-century experiment of investing in a benign state that is proud to take responsibility for its own citizens has not been abandoned for no other reason but that it was going so well.”

But what about the opinion polls? The only relief for Ed Miliband comes from the latest opinion polls. YouGov for the Sunday Times has Labour three points ahead of the Tories.

Opinium for The Observer gives Labour a one-point lead. The same poll, incidentally, has the Lib Dems on five per cent – their worst rating in any poll since 2010. So, not a happy morning for Nick Clegg, either.