Read today's "Times" for a savage demolition of Ed Miliband

The Times newspaper used to be known as “The Thunderer” because when they published a leader article or columnist’s piece which went for someone, they REALLY went for them.

Today they’ve published one of the most devastating attacks on a British party leader which I have ever read.

Today’s “Times” has an extraordinarily strongly worded – and in my opinion extremely powerful – attack on Ed Miliband as Leader of the opposition and as a potential Prime Minister from David Aaronovitch.

The headline is "Ed Miliband is no leader. He is a vulture." and it gets tougher from there.

It makes the article in which the late Bernard Levin raided the Thesaurus for every insulting word he could find and hurled them all at John Major seem like a love pat by comparison.

This article is behind a paywall, so you have to pay to read it, either by paying to visit the Times site or by purchasing today's "Dead Tree" copy.

There are commentaries on the article by Fraser Nelson on the Spectator blog here, and by John Rentoul in the Independent, who is nearly as critical of Miliband, at

Ed Miliband on Syria: let anyone decide as long as it's not me.

David Aaronovitch will always be remembered by those like myself who were students in the early 1980’s as a former “Communist” president of the National Union of Students – the inverted commas are because he wasn’t known for taking the kind of left-wing position which you probably associate with communists. He was described at the time by Paul Goodman, later a Tory MP and currently editor of “Conservative Home,” as “The sort of Communist who is more right wing than Ted Heath.”

You never knew what David Aaronovitch was going to say next except that it would be exactly what he really thought and he didn’t care who he upset.

Well, today’s piece will really, really upset the leadership of the Labour party.

Those people who don't support British intervention in Syria may be inclined to assume that David Aaronovitch is getting at Miliband for voting against such an intervention, given that what crystallised David Aaronovitch in the conviction that Ed Miliband would be a “disaster” as Prime Minister was the Syria vote. But this would be to miss the point.

What really upset David about the way Labour responded to the issue of Syria was not the fact that Miliband came down against it, but how he reached that position - in particular, the way he kept changing his position so as to be able to oppose the government, eventually helping to vote down a government position which was very similar to what Labour initially said they wanted and which included most of the caveats and safeguards Labour had originally asked for.

Aaronovitch draws a clear distinction between Miliband’s position and those Labour figures who have consistently opposed any military move against Syria which he describes with the words

“That at least is a position. An impossible one, but it’s a position. Does Labour believe it though? Does Labour, in fact, believe anything?”

He goes on to say of Ed Miliband that he was a "spokesman for nothing" and that

"He wouldn’t outline his own alternative strategy — he’d just defeat Mr Cameron’s. And in this moment of crisis it became clear ...  what Mr Miliband is. A personable man (and he is a very pleasant companion), politically he is not a presence at all, he is an absence ... 

... the anti-Blair, the non-Brown.

"His technique for victory to is follow behind the leader, wait for a slip-up and exploit his or her mistakes. He did it to his brother. He hopes to do it to David Cameron. He is neither hunter nor prey, he is scavenger. He is a political vulture.

"Mission creep? His mission is all about creeping."

His final paragraph includes the following:

"Although you can just about see how in a bad year Ed Miliband could become prime minister, what I cannot any longer pretend, after three years of his leadership, is that he would be a good one."