Leadership woes overshadow Labour prospects

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) With his party ahead in opinion polls eight months before an election, opposition leader Ed Miliband could be Britain's next prime minister. Yet his Labour party is in the odd position of trying to win power despite, not thanks to him.

An Opinium/Observer poll released yesterday after his party's conference, the last before May's national election, showed Labour's lead over Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives had been cut to two percentage points, down six points in a fortnight, after Miliband forgot vital parts of his speech.

Derided by the press as a socially awkward nerd, Miliband, an Oxford-educated career politician with the demeanour of an academic, is seen by some in and around his party as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

"If they (Labour) win, they're winning it in spite of him," Peter Simpson, a worker for a non-governmental organisation who last week attended Labour's annual conference in Manchester, northern England, said.

"Everyone is worried about real core issues like the National Health Service and the Conservatives being seen to be in the pockets of the rich. They'll win it because of that, not because of Miliband. If anything he could lose it for them."

Anxious to defuse his image problem, something that has dogged him since he won the party leadership in 2010, Miliband took the unusual step of publicly mocking his own image in July, saying he rejected "a politics driven by image".

But Britons, and some in his own party, remain sceptical amid signs that a perception among some voters that he cannot be trusted to run the economy or to reduce immigration - two of the country's biggest pre-election issues - could be an obstacle to his party winning office.

A protege of former prime minister Gordon Brown, Miliband presents himself as a heavyweight left-wing intellectual who has a 10-year plan to rebalance the economy in favour of low-wage workers and society's most vulnerable.

Yet he frequently finds his policies overshadowed by his perceived presentational shortcomings with the press mercilessly poking fun at the way he looks, talks, walks, and even eats. That has kept his personal ratings low.

In a YouGov poll released last week, 63 percent said they thought Miliband wasn't up to the job of being prime minister.

He polls much better when it comes to how closely people perceive him to be in touch with ordinary people, but poorly when it comes to leadership and economic competence.

His centre-left party, most recently in power from

1997-2010, is more popular than him. Polls give it a lead over the Conservatives of between 1 and 8 points. The same polls show Cameron is much more popular among voters than Miliband.

Cameron, a former public relations executive, is a polished speaker. He has his own image problems though - some voters regard him as too keen to protect the narrow interests of the privileged part of society he comes from.

Cameron, 47, often gets the better of Miliband, 44, in weekly question and answer sessions in parliament which are televised and shown on TV news bulletins.