Ed Miliband is being 'gamed out', warns Cruddas
In a leaked recording passed to The Telegraph, Jon Cruddas, the Labour leader’s policy adviser, said “a lot of things haven’t really been reconciled” and also warned that Mr Miliband was being “gamed out” on a weekly basis
The recording, said to have been made at last week's Fabian conference is the second such warning to have been privately sounded by Mr Cruddas in recent weeks.
Last month, he criticised "the dead hand" of the Labour leader's office on policy development.
The private remarks underline the growing concerns at the top of Labour over Mr Miliband's lacklustre leadership. Mr Cruddas’ remarks suggest that Miliband has failed to successfully build bridges with Ed Balls.
In the new recording passed to the Telegraph, Mr Cruddas said that Mr Miliband was battling to unite “different camps” within the party, and struggling to manage the news cycle.
“He’s actually trying to unpack it, he’s trying to unpack it,” said Mr Cruddas. “But he just gets gamed out every day, every week because of the news cycle, the media, levels of intrusion, the party management side.”
“The fact that a lot of things haven’t really been reconciled – the different camps,” he added, as he spoke at the Labour activist gathering at the weekend.
Mr Cruddas, who is heading Labour's policy review before the next election, also appeared to admit that Labour had failed to respond fast enough to the changing political situation as the economy improved in recent months.
“When we lost we never really had a real thorough period of introspection,” he admitted.
He also said that the Labour leadership was failing to take in new ideas, saying they could “just acknowledge them, rather than just say ‘oh, keep away.’”
Mr Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, is a key figure in the Labour party, and has been charged with formulating the policies that will make up the manifesto on which Miliband will fight the next general election.
When he was appointed head of Mr Miliband’s election policy review in 2012, Mr Miliband described him as “one of the most radical and deepest thinkers in the party”.
The new intervention by Mr Cruddas comes in the middle of a difficult week for Mr Miliband. Senior Labour advisers have rounded on him, warning that his party has no direction and will not win a general election while it is perceived as “anti-business”.
