Miliband has excellent ideas – he just needs to make himself more visible

It’s no good preparing for set-pieces if you can’t also be spontaneous

Ed Miliband and his deputy Harriet Harman at the Labour Party conference in Manchester (Getty)

A raging debate about constitutional reform generates two reactions from senior national politicians — disingenuous piety, and waffle. Both are wholly understandable and arguably unavoidable reactions, but we need to recognise the patterns for what they are.

At the Labour conference in Manchester there are a lot of sincere but vacuous declarations about the need for politics to be “done differently”. There will be the same at the other party conferences. When asked precisely what is meant by this there is not a lot of substance.

When “the people” are angry, political leaders have no choice but to argue that they get the message, that the constitution must be torn up to “empower the people”. But the constitution will not be torn up because it will leave even more of a mess than we are in at the moment.

There are so many ironies in this current debate. One of them is that every senior minister I have known, Tory and Labour, tell me that they find it almost impossible to implement change and that they are more powerless than most voters and the media realise. Now they unleash a debate supposedly aimed at making them even more powerless, apparently willing to hand over the levers to bodies far less accountable and scrutinised than they are.

Meanwhile all positions will be taken, again understandably, with their parties’ self-interest in mind, which means there will be no consensus. I predict the historic constitutional debate will end up with the Scottish Parliament getting the powers that the leaders pledged in their “vows”, the most minimal interpretation possible, and over the years a bit more cash will be devolved to local government.

That will be the limit of the constitutional revolution. But we are leaping several hurdles, or predicting that several hurdles will not be leapt over. For now the constitution fuels the pre-election debate. The need to stand up for England, as well as Scotland, becomes part of Ed Miliband’s task when he speaks to the Labour conference today.

On the basis of his previous conference speeches, he will meet the challenge. His annual addresses tend to bring the best out of him. Unusually for a leader of the opposition, the speeches - beginning with the one about the need for responsible capitalism - form a coherent whole. They are rooted ideologically, and mark an attempt to give the left-of-centre case the widest possible appeal.

In advance of today’s speech Miliband’s response to David Cameron’s sudden raising of the English Question is fairly typical of his leadership as a whole. At first he was hopelessly slow to acknowledge the suddenly changed context, making no specific reference in his statement on Friday morning after the referendum.

But crucially, Miliband got his response precisely right in the end. When a constitutional proposal is made that sounds reasonable, but might make governing even more impossible than it already is, a sensible leader kicks the proposal into the long grass. This is not heroic and can lead to the need for some evasiveness, but when interviewed by Andrew Marr on Sunday Miliband managed well the balancing act, pointing out the flaws in Cameron’s answers to the English Question while not ruling anything out.

That was the tactical element, more Harold Wilson than Margaret Thatcher in relation to the expedient calculations. Miliband’s substantive response was as important. He appreciates that the energetic anger in the Scottish referendum sprung from much more than the constitution. Voters feel powerless in the face of failed markets and fractured public services where no one is accountable for their delivery. They are alarmed about the high cost of renting or buying a property and that jobs are not as secure as they once were.

In Scotland that wider sense of powerlessness was a vote-winner for the Yes campaign. But large parts of England also despair over the very same issues. There are a lot of consumers across the UK who feel powerless when they receive energy bills or try to book a train at short notice. Parents have no idea to which body they should complain if they worry about their school. Patients know choice is the great chimera of our age and worry about getting to see a GP, let alone a mythical hospital of their choice.

Pollsters tell me that when Alex Salmond warned about the future of the NHS the votes swung towards Yes and when Gordon Brown reassured on the NHS he stemmed the tide. People’s worries about their day-to-day lives come before any worries they might have about the West Lothian Question.

Miliband understands this and will no doubt frame his arguments accordingly. His strength as a leader is that he does have clear, radical ideas for changing the way Britain is run, ones he has consistently argued for. His evident weakness is his failure to communicate the vision every hour of every day. Most voters do not follow closely his speeches or his performances in the Commons. There was evidence in the referendum campaign that voters did not have a clue what he stood for.

Miliband is a set-piece leader who then disappears from view. He prepares assiduously for the leader’s key moments - conference speeches, Prime Minister’s Questions, the interviews that accompany conference speeches. Sometimes he is too assiduous, the 60 drafts and the endless meetings to prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions. But between these events he keeps the lowest public profile of any leader of the opposition that I can recall.

Last March a producer on the Today programme bumped into Miliband and suggested an interview. Miliband told her that he would give one on Today at the conference this week, several months later. That is not enough national exposure. I know all the risks of such interviews but he needs to be part of the national conversation continuously, leaping on breaking issues - a train fare rise, a crisis in a school, to make wider points.

Miliband has the courage and integrity to avoid the sort of superficial photocalls Cameron took part in as opposition leader - the huskies and the hoodies. But in our presidential culture the Labour leader cannot return from this conference and await the next set-piece.

Most of the time voters are not listening. Messages have to be relayed constantly or else the electorate will conclude they are all the bloody same. Today Miliband will show again that they are not all the bloody same. He needs to keep on showing it between now and the election.