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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now Labour figures both past and present have been questioning the party leader’s ability to lead them to victory in next year’s general election.  With dire ratings in the polls Ed Miliband has been accused of failing to convince the public of what he and Labour stand for but his supporters are rallying.  Lord Kinnock says he is the victim of a vindictive hostile media, so is Lord Kinnock right?  I’m joined now by John McTernan who worked for the Labour party of course for the whole of the Blair and Brown eras, a very good morning to you John.  The first thing that strikes me about one of the accusations being put against Ed Miliband is we don’t want you to be like Neil Kinnock, should you lose the next election you’ll have to go and then he wheels out Neil Kinnock to support him. 

JOHN McTERNAN: Well I don't think anybody wheels Neil Kinnock out anywhere, Neil Kinnock is a force of nature, he came out himself and I think Neil is voicing what a lot of people in the party think which is there’s a strange strain of bullying going on at the moment of Ed.  If I took a photograph of you eating a sandwich I could make you look like a muppet if I wanted to, there is something rather distasteful about that.  Playing the man means you’re not playing the ball.  There’s no doubt what Ed stands for, he stands for a price freeze on energy which is very popular, he stands for more house building which is very popular, he stands for a living wage which is very popular, he stands for giving more power to the big cities outside London.  In a funny kind of way we know more about what an Ed Miliband government would do than almost any Labour government since …

DM: So you think the whole thing is about having a narrative, having a story, you think there is a coherent one there?

JOHN McTERNAN: There clearly is for the public because we keep having these crises when Labour has a 4-7% lead in the opinion polls, so clearly the public out there are thinking, and for three years they have broadly had Labour in the lead and the Tories never getting above the vote that they got in 2010.  Remember, the Tories couldn’t beat Gordon Brown in the middle of a recession, that’s how unpopular they were then and they’ve not got any more popular, in fact their votes have split off to UKIP so it’s a funny kind of world where the Prime Minister is picking fights in Europe that he is going to lose, he is apparently strong and not in crisis and Ed Miliband who is leading a party that’s topping the polls, is under pressure.

DM: You came out with that old phrase, playing the man and not the ball, come on this is politics, Labour does that too.  Look at the whole characterisation of the  Conservative party as out of touch toffs. 

JOHN McTERNAN: I think they call them out of touch millionaires, because one they are millionaires and …

DM: But Tory toffs has got a nice alliterative feel to it. 

JOHN McTERNAN: Tory toff is not a phrase that I would ever use because I agree with David Cameron, it’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going that matters and that’s where modern Britain is.  I’d far rather be a party where we are now with a very clear agenda set out by Ed, with a very clear poll lead and we’re now eleven months out from a general election.  Since Christmas commentators have said this poll lead is going to go away, this poll lead is going to go away so clearly what you have is Ed and his policies, the policies are popular, the party is popular, he needs to get out and about and the thing he is doing is a stealth campaign.  He is out there, he’s like John Major on a soap box and I think if Ed Miliband and David Cameron met every single voter, they’d go Ed Miliband [inaudible].

DM: You are in the hostile media camp but there are voices, identified voices, within the Labour party who are saying these things to the media, some of them unidentified but we know the sources and some of them like Lord Mandelson saying, he’s the leader we have therefore the leader I support, that’s not exactly full on support is it?    

JOHN McTERNAN: Well the Labour party only has one leader at a time and there is clearly not going to be a leadership election before the next general election. If Ed wins …

DM: But he doesn’t command universal confidence within the party.

JOHN MCTERNAN: I think the interesting thing is that he so narrowly beat David in the leadership election and that we’ve had such unity in the party.  The Labour party is a fractious party, it always has been a fractious party, look at the Blair/Brown wars, there’s been nothing like that.  This is nothing compared to what went on when we were actually in government and before we were in government between Tony and Gordon.  Yes, there are noises off, there are always noises off and do you know why?  It’s because some people have relevance deprivation, that means if I’m not in the papers I’m not really existing in politics and that’s what you have think.  Do we have a course? Yes.  Do we have policies? Yes.  Are we going to change those polices?  No.  Should we retell them better?  Of course we should, it’s a hard fight, you have to fight hard to win and the people who don’t help – there is a thing that David Clough who is Obama’s campaign strategist told me, he said you get your strategy and stick to it and when you’ve got it and sticking to it, don’t let the monkeys in the cheap seats throw peanuts at you.

DM: Okay, John, thank you very much indeed and relevance deprivation, one of the phrases out of you!  John McTernan there.