The media are focusing on Nick Cleggs absence but the real issue for the country to decide is this: the decision to make the reasonable and modest demands of Europe were agreed by the Coalition. What would Labour do - time and again Labour were asked would you have signed this treaty? They will not answer. Ed is so firmly stuck on the fence he has splinters - he is neither for or against the strikes, nor for or against the Euro regulation or the treaty? It is easy to be in opposition as you never have the chance or need to make a decision.
One journalist described Mr Miliband's style yesterday as follows:
"Several times yesterday Mr Cameron demanded to know what Ed Miliband would have done with the treaty. In fact, the Labour thinking on the summit was always perfectly clear: wait and see whatever the Prime Minister did, and then denounce it. It wouldn’t have mattered what he’d done. He could have brought back a gold ingot for every family in the country and Labour would have derided him. “Yet another sign of weakness from this Prime Minister. Had we been at the summit, we would have been able to give every British family 10 gold ingots, a cruise holiday in the Caribbean and a robot butler.”
This is not an especially extravagant parody of Ed Miliband’s oratory style; time and again at the dispatch box he opens with quiet, detailed questions, then the occasion gets to him and he starts squawking like an excited chicken."
