Ed Miliband

Above: Ed Miliband seems to be emerging as the front runner for leader of the Labour Party.

On This Week yesterday Ed Miliband talked to Andrew Neil about his campaign to become leader of the Labour Party. His voice has a unique sound I can't identify - it's as if he is continually gobbling his words ("like the Soup Dragon on the Clangers"). During the interview he revealed that he had only been an MP since 2005.

Attitudes towards Ed Miliband are mixed. About half of media commentators regard him as an intellectual man of integrity. The other half talk of him as if he were Ass-Eared Folly in Mantegna's Allegory on the Fall of Ignorant Humanity.

This Week is now "on holiday" until September, mirroring the excessive summer holiday of the House of Commons. In the past MPs took the summer off because they had to bring in the harvest on their landed estates. Now they just loaf around.



Above: Andrew Rawnsley writing in The Observer.

Lawrence Durrell wrote in the 1950s: it is the unthinking instinct of the Left to promote civil war. As well as class war within wider society, this also applies to factional war within the Labour Party. None of the five candidates (except perhaps Burnham) can be called a unity figure.