It's a sign of how politics and the media works that a political storm has erupted today (and it's only 9 a.m.) about a speech Ed Miliband hasn't even given. Later on the campaign trail he's due to say, journalists have been briefed, that "The refugee crisis and tragic scenes in the Mediterranean are in part a direct result of failure of post conflict planning for Libya". The Tories have seized on this as a criticism of their role in the bombing which helped remove Colonel Gaddafi from power. There is much angry frothing of the mouth in the Tory campaign, some of it possibly even genuine.
Pre-leaking a speech gives the Labour leader the chance to amend it before actually making it. The latest I can find is that Miliband will say "since the action, the failure of post conflict planning has become obvious. David Cameron was wrong to assume that Libya's political culture and institutions could be left to evolve and transform on their own".
I'm not going to waste time deconstructing the differences, if any, between these two utterances, still less mulling over the wisdom or otherwise of the Libyan intervention or the effect it might have had on the thousands of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to a better life in Europe. The thrust of the intervention is that David Cameron got it wrong, and that he abandoned the people of Libya to their fate.
Ed Miliband, on the other hand, is a man who in those circumstances would do the right thing.
This is where reality steps up and bashes you in the face in the manner of a carelessly discarded garden rake. Ed Miliband? A man who won't abandon the people of the Middle East when they are in trouble? Does Miliband think no-one remembers the way Labour blocked the Government's plans to help the Syrian rebels against President Assad's regime in the summer of 2013? No post conflict planning was needed there because Miliband's action helped ensure that, nearly two years later, the conflict is still going on. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, a vacuum of power into which ISIS has swaggered with its decapitations, burnings, defenestrations and cultural genocide.
It would be wrong of course to lay all this at the door of a man whose Hampstead liberalism is characterised much more by its utter ineffectualness rather than brutality. But by preventing Britain from acting, Miliband helped to make it easier for Obama to step aside, and to create a political atmosphere across the western world in which it was possible for leaders afraid of commitment to draw back.
Ah, I hear you say, but Miliband's action was tough and principled. He stopped Cameron doing anything because he knew the result would be to make things even worse in Syria.
Now this is clearly balls - how could things possibly get any worse than they eventually turned out to be? - but nevertheless some people will believe it and so, not surprisingly, does Miliband himself.
In fact Miliband is so proud of his blocking vote that he has been boasting about it on TV. I know this because the (Labour-sympathising) journalist Dan Hodges wrote a terrific article about it in the Torygraph a month ago. You can read it here.
On Newsnight Miliband told Jeremy Paxman that he was tough enough to be British PM because he had "stood up to the leader of the free world" over Syria. "I made up my mind, and we said no, right? I think standing up to the leader of the free world shows a certain toughness I would say".
But even if you think Miliband made the right decision, Hodges shows in damning detail that it was not one made as a matter of principle. He accuses Miliband of lying.
Hodges - who is not, one imagines, on the Labour leader's Christmas card list - says Miliband told Cameron that he would be prepared to support military action, but the Labour party would need some persuading. He would need some concessions. The first of these was merely that Cameron would need to publish legal advice showing the action was legal. Then he said that Cameron would need to publish the intelligence showing the Assad regime had used chemical weapons. Then Cameron would need to show the action had UN approval. Then Miliband said a vote would have to await the publication of the UN weapons inspectors report into the attacks. Then he said there would have to be two Commons votes before action could be authorised.
These conditions were made over several days. Cameron agreed to all of them.
Hodges claims contact with sources on both the Labour and Coalition sides to back up his story. Labour whips, he says, had been told there would be "a significant backbench rebellion" if Miliband supported military action. Miliband was being warned that he "risked a reaction from Labour supporters, in particular, former Lib Dems who had recently switched allegiance".
Hodges concludes that "It was on that basis, and that basis alone, that Ed Miliband decided to vote against the Government. It was not an act of principle. It was not an act of strength. It was an act of political calculation and opportunism born out of political weakness". Remember that at the time there was significant disquiet in Labour circles about the quality of Miliband's leadership.
"Stand up to Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin?", Hodges asks cattily. "Ed Miliband wouldn't stand up to Diane Abbott".
I depart from Hodges in only one respect. I do think Ed Miliband is tough. You don't get to be Labour leader without being tough. But it depends what you mean by tough, and perhaps it might be better to describe Miliband as ruthless.
I see him as a ruthless man who will say or do anything to secure his own political advantage. That's why he will criticise David Cameron over Libya today. That's why he blocked Cameron's Syrian action, and that's why he lied about it on Newsnight. None of these things mean that Miliband would be a bad Prime Minister, or for that matter that he is markedly different from other politicians.
They do however make rather baffling the claim made by Labour supporters that Ed Miliband is a man of principle, a claim comprehensible only on the basis that the Left suffers from a pathology of self-righteousness and, being sure of occupying the moral high ground itself, cannot bear to imagine its luminaries in any other terms.
PS A few days after writing the above paragraph I learned that the New Statesman had done a survey to find out about the tolerance of political groups towards each other. It found out that people on the Left were twice as likely as the Right to drop a friend or acquaintance because they had different political allegiances. This mirrors work done by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who found that Republicans were much better at explaining the views of Democrats than vice versa. Haidt put this down to lack of empathy. Whatever, as I said, it's a pathology.
