A couple of things spring to mind.
First, Miliband is of the same generation as Cameron and Osborne. Fate ensured that I ended up as a contemporary of both Miliband and Osborne at university (Milband was in his final year in my first year, Osborne his second. Cameron was landing on his feet - so he thought - as an adviser to Lamont, in no small part based on his reputation as a very, very intelligent man. Cameron, whatever one may think of him, is not stupid; whether that means he has any common sense is another matter, though...).
Miliband was running the University Labour Club. Badly. Much of the success - such as it was - that the Labour club enjoyed at the time was because the Tories were so unpopular (Thatcher had yet to be kicked out). But, since 'hacks' of all sorts were regarded with a certain degree of contempt by the majority of students - beer, sex, sport/acting/music/comedy/curry, beer, more sex, more sport/acting/music/comedy/curry, work, a spot more beer, a little more work and perhaps some more beer were more important - it required them to at least appear to offer something tangible to the masses. And Edward (as he was callling himself) didn't.
Labour candidates scraped in because they weren't Tories or Lib Dems (the latter were dirty campaigners who offered manifestos that changed daily and who usually failed to get elected
despite the electoral system being based on AV...), but the Miliband tenure was notable for the fact that two independents got elected to the student union when the Labour apparatchiks should've won, both winning on the basis that they were...er... how can I put it... ummmm.... exceedingly fit and, in the case of one candidate, possessed of a smile that suggested she might be quite dirty (she was in fact acceptably smutty, but nothing more. I digress).
If you'd told me that, 20 years later, Miliband would be leading the Labour party, I'd have concluded that
either Labour had been destroyed in an election in the mid-90s and reduced to a rump with a small pool from which to draw its leader
or had taken leave of its senses as a party
or was fortunate enough to be up against a Conservative government with a small majority and the usual 'rescue nation from last Labour government, incurring mass unpopularity along way' fashion. And I'd have assumed that he'd brown-nosed a block vote or two to get there whichever of the three above applied.
Osborne was... well, he was a non-entity. I looked up his dates of his attending Magdalen just a moment ago to see if he was in my year (I was at one of the sports & drinking colleges, not anywhere academic like Magdalen), and had a 'fcuk me! He was the bloke who looked as though he communicated by braying who was in the Tuesday afternoon seminars' epiphany as I realised that his slightly shiny face had entered my conscience some years before the rest of the nation became familiar with it.
I am now entirely unsurprised about a number of things to do with his tenure, although he did, if memory serves, show hints of knowing more about economics than most Oxford undergrads who did PPE - remember that just because it's called PPE doesn't actually mean that you have to study the Economics bit to any depth after the first year (one contemporary got nine months for possession with intent to supply because while he continued to study 'E' in second year, he'd forgotten what the initial letter stood for -although his dealing did give him an insight into supply and demand).
Generationally, Miliband is smack bang in the middle between Cameron and Osborne. He did nothing that marked him out as different when a student, and has, as far as I can ascertain, done nothing since bar loyally spouting the party line. He's cut from the same cloth - wet blanket - and as PM is unlikely to improve things. More of the same unless he changes his spots, and quickly.
The other thing I'd suggest is that Cameron didn't appreciate that he was going to have the albatross of Clegg and the Lib Dems to deal with. As I think I said on another thread, the problem Cameron has is that a significant proportion of his backbenchers are to the big political picture what Salman Rushdie is to Islamic literature, failing to understand that Thatcherism blue in tooth and claw does not win elections (because the spectre of the swinging handbag is wheeled out by the opposition, convincing the floating voters not to go Tory), or that if suspending full-on Conservatism-lite for the duration of a coalition government enables you to remove the built in imbalance in the electoral system that gives Labour an advantage (same percentage of votes = notable Labour majority in seats), then you suck it up, applauding as the PM knifes AV/PR for a generation and gives the Lib Dems the chance to implode removing them as a credible third force rather than dripping about the fact that he's not Margaret Thatcher. Try doing anything Thatcherite if the coalition collapses and you have to try to govern as a minority administration, chaps: Thatcherism less-than- lite ain't going to fly...
The difficulty was - as we saw here on arrse- was that too many people failed to grasp that the large poll leads he enjoyed in the run up to the election were (a.) going to be eroded as Labour drew on those they had made supplicant by ensuring that benefits could only be sustained by their continuance in office and (b.) were still not going to be big enough to offset the inbuilt Labour advantage, particularly since some Tories who disliked the fact that Cameron wasn't Enoch Powell or the Blessed Margaret of Grantham and who clearly wasn't likely to declare war on France any time soon voted for UKIP, thus ensuring that they were going to help the most Europhile party in the country into government (whichever party provided the bulk of the MPs for the subsequent coalition) because of the sort of fcukwittery that was entirely predictable from them.
I'd suggest that Cameron could, in about 100 years time, be regarded as a PM whose potential was hamstrung by the fact that too many of his MPs and notable supporters were fcukwits of the first order whose fixation on short-termism ensured that their criticism of the PM helped to reinforce Labour's position so that they got in in 2015, with the inbuilt advantage in the system giving them a majority just large enough to ensure that Miliband's premiership ended with a narrow defeat in the 2025 election.
And all for failing to do a bit of thinking about the long game - kill AV [done], destroy the Lib Dems's credibility (in part by keeping them sweet over things that could be easily reversed after getting shot of them after the 2015 election) [done], sing from the same hymn sheet about the brilliance of the PM and Chancellor facing the most unprecedented financial crisis ever and aren't we all lucky not to be living in cardboard boxes/suffering wage retrenchment/etc/etc - all spun beyond truth, of course, maybe ensure that the SNP get their noses bloodied, and then get a majority in 2015 because Miliband and Balls's utter hopelessness is exposed in the face of Tory unity which leaves the nation thinking 'ach, we'd rather be bent over and shafted again by the bastards we know rather than the ones who got us into this mess, who are still bastards and who are still clearly inept. Post endogenous growth theory? Shove it up your post endogenous rectum, Mr Balls' and giving Cameron a small majority...
...which is when, and
not before, Tory halfwits, you unseat Cameron and go for the 'True Conservatism' you've been blathering on about. Granted, within six months, Nadine Dorres will have demonstrated that, yes, she
is that fcuking stupid and Douglas Carswell will have been proven to be an
android with a malfunctioning facial expression circuit who's utterly devoid of emotion, and yes, you will then see what defeat looks like in 2020 when the nation attempts to illustrate to you once again that full on Thatcherism isn't what they want in the third decade of the 21st Century in the same way that they consider Gladstonian Liberalism a tad irrelevant (if they know what it is). But hey, but knock yourselves out. But if you are going to get yourself into a position where you can govern on the basis of being utter bastards, at least be competent about it and have something approximating to a strategy, you utter, utter arrses.
Mercer fails to appreciate that his race is run - barring some odd turn of fate, he's not going to be whisked away from cabinet meetings after deliberating on major issues of policy with some flunky pretending to fawn over his every word. He's yesterday's news. Problem is that his animus to Cameron means that he's entirely willing to fcuk the PM over ASAP, even if that means that he creates conditions likely to increase the chance of Miliband getting in - which in turn suggests that the pious crap about how his party is the only viable option for making things better for people is just pious crap and that as long as his nest is well-feathered, the populace can go hang under Labour since their fate is much, much less important.
Which, in turn, suggests that anything he once recalled from Serve to Lead is forgotten and that the petty, shite-stirring, hang-the-electorate political parlour games matter to him more than the conception that conservatism in any form is always going to be better than Labour (the idea that Tory MPs are sort of meant to possess...) and that he should be endeavouring to do the best for his constituents on that basis - which doesn't mean burning your party to the ground leaving Ed Miliband to stride across the charred wastelands for the next decade, occasionally falling into potholes, while you pontificate from your seat in the Lords, Patrick, confidently predicting the return of a political style which was of its time and which will not return in our lifetimes.