Jayne Dowle: Miliband must show us if he is a premier in waiting

We already have a scenario in which Ed Miliband is openly ridiculed in the street. When he turned up in Edinburgh last week to urge unity ahead of the Scottish referendum, his walkabout ended in chaos and he had to be hustled away for his own safety. Remember the debacle over the bacon sandwich? Remember when the Doncaster North MP made a horrendous miscalculation on the price of a weekly shop? I could go on, but it is cruel to recount these horror stories.

It is in this context that Miliband prepares for the biggest conference of his life. Only eight months to go until the General Election, and he knows that everybody in the audience will be thinking about that bacon sandwich moment.

In an ideal world, the Labour Party conference is there to thrash out 
policy and strategy and promote a show of unity.

Under the circumstances, I think it is fair to say that this year will be the most intimidating conference that Miliband has ever had to face. Not only does he have his own reputation to uphold but he has the ghost of Labour leaders past on his shoulder and the challenges within his own party to take on.

It’s often said that Miliband is at his best when delivering a long set-piece speech. However, the challenge he faces goes beyond fine words delivered on a podium. Those with long political memories will remember the rousing rhetoric of his predecessors Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair and what happened next in each case.

And, of course, Miliband has the public to convince. Fashionable debate questions whether the conference has any relevance in modern politics. Some ask whether there is any point to this annual jamboree at all. They suggest that Twitter and other forms of social media are superseding spin-doctored speeches, cloistered meetings and bar-room confidences. Cyberspace is where political reputations can be made or destroyed these days, they say.

These modernisers have a point. However, I’d argue that the party conference still has a particular purpose – to present politicians in front of us when the rest of the year we can generally ignore them if we choose.

In Labour’s case, it gives us a chance to see what they are made of, to account for themselves and to convince us why they can run the country. It also gives us the opportunity to observe the cracks.

Remember, it’s not just about the person on the stage making the speech. It’s about the looks on the faces of those in the audience while they are doing it.

This is where Miliband will face his biggest demons. He must promote a sense of unity, but at the same time he cannot ignore the fact that the public, and much of the party (if they are honest), have had their faith severely dented.

He cannot ignore the fact that his leadership is under question. He cannot ignore the fact that there continue to be rumblings – and shots across the bows – from the camp of his Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls.

By all accounts, the relationship between the two is strained at best. In an interview earlier this year, Balls admitted that he didn’t even know if he would be Shadow Chancellor should Labour win in 2015. His response to the question spoke volumes: “I’ve never had that conversation with him.”

Do Balls and Miliband have any conversations at all, you wonder? We can be forgiven for questioning the nature of their relationship.

However, it would be invidious, indeed downright dangerous, to set the two against each other so close to a General Election. Political hacks and insiders might relish the gossip and point-scoring but this does no good at all to your ordinary voter in the street. What we want is a strong and viable Opposition which presents a united front. We want something to believe in. We have little patience for political infighting. And most people have limited understanding of the philosophical differences between the two Eds. It’s hard enough keeping up with the vacillations of one Ed (Miliband) without trying to compare the two on an ongoing basis.

Cleverer political minds than mine will be thrashing this out all week. It’s a waste of time, frankly. There is one way to get something positive out of this conference, and that is to be truly radical.

The very notion of political leadership is undergoing seismic change, so let’s stop obsessing over what the leader does and does not stand for.

Let’s stop tying ourselves in knots over challenges to the left of him and challenges to the right. Let’s see this conference as a chance to observe the Labour movement as a whole and to look ahead over the horizon. And let’s remember that this is one of our last chances to decide whether Ed Miliband is fit to be Prime Minister – or not.