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WI: Successful Bonfire Night plot to topple Miliband

CTTeller

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Apparently there was a plot to topple Ed Miliband in November of 2014, just over half a year before the 2015 general election. Apparently there was something of a backbench revolt and figures met to discuss the possibilities of alternative leaders to lead the party into the general election to save the party from outright defeat. What if this succeeded, and who would be in the frontline to succeed him? I suspect a certain bearded backbencher would not be in the frame.
 
Apparently there was a plot to topple Ed Miliband in November of 2014, just over half a year before the 2015 general election. Apparently there was something of a backbench revolt and figures met to discuss the possibilities of alternative leaders to lead the party into the general election to save the party from outright defeat. What if this succeeded, and who would be in the frontline to succeed him? I suspect a certain bearded backbencher would not be in the frame.
Do you happen to know who the proposed alternative leaders were?
 
That short a distance out from the election they need a leader who has instant name recognition among the electorate - that candidate doesn't really exist in 2014's Labour Party, but Alan Johnson is probably as close as you get. David Miliband would be better, but by November 2014 he's on Tracy Island.

But Labour isn't faced with a hopeless election like the Conservatives were when they elected Michael Howard, so Johnson isn't being put up to lose an election, so ambitious candidates can't afford to unite behind a single candidate - if they decide to put (rolls my Labour MP dice) Alistair Darling in charge there's a chance that he actually ends up in charge of the largest party, if not holding a full majority, come May 2015, and Burnham, Cooper, Alexander etc. have to hold their fire until he can be convinced to step down.

So you have a situation where Labour need a coronation, but there are too many candidates who can't afford a coronation, so you end up with a clown car leadership election which drags on into early 2015, and then a very surprised-looking Ben Bradshaw has a couple of months to answer the question, "Who?" or hand the Conservatives the election.
 
In short, the options are coronation or contest. There's no appetite among the candidates who would be standing aside for a coronation, so it's a contest. Whoever wins the contest is betting the house on winning in May (and if they don't stand they're betting the house that their hated opponent doesn't win in May) but also starting from a more difficult position than Miliband had been in before they toppled him.

I suppose if they don't topple Miliband then they're betting the house that Miliband won't win in May and they'll get their chance - it worked out for them in OTL (except it all went wrong and Jeremy Corbyn won the ensuing leadership election), but they didn't know it would.
 
I don't know how likely it is to succeed if it was properly tried, but I don't see "hey electorate we replaced the leader you know the name of with Alan Johnson" working out too well with an election less than a year away, especially not when he's the shadow chancellor and the Tories can use all the same economic arguments on him.
 
I don't see the 2014 grumbling succeeding at all, in common with every other putsch attempt on Labour leaders of the last fifteen years, but Alan Johnson was the magic cure-all alternative in the minds of the people behind the plot.
Agreed; I think, like with all of these Labour leadership challenge what-ifs, there is an unfortunate solidity to Labour's inability to wield the knife which renders them subject to a What If? essay style putdown of 'well, it's an interesting idea, but it'd never happen and probably wouldn't change much if it did'. Which of course our own @Meadow effectively wrote an entire book based on that principle.

In a sense the Corbyn leadership was the ultimate stress-test of that principle, and even under the most extreme conditions, with almost the entire PLP virulently against the leader, the most it could muster was Angela Eagle being a punchline and Owen Smith being a footnote.
 
I think Corbyn was relatively close to chucking in the towel in 2016 when the mass resignations were happening, but a) he didn't and b) pretty much the entire PLP was opposing him, which definitely wasn't close to being the case with Milliband.
Yes, but that was in large part because Corbyn had the will to cling on in the face of public humiliation, which is unlikely to be true for most conventional politicians. I'm pretty sure that Ed said during the 2016 coup that he would have gone if faced with the same situation.
 
Yes, but that was in large part because Corbyn had the will to cling on in the face of public humiliation, which is unlikely to be true for most conventional politicians. I'm pretty sure that Ed said during the 2016 coup that he would have gone if faced with the same situation.

Jeremy also had - or at least had the perception of - mass support from the membership, meaning he still had a strong base within the party even as the PLP turned against him; could we really say the same for Miliband? For all the talk that he was owned by the unions, after the Falkirk fumble I feel like those bridges are probably burnt.
 
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