It's Ed 'Ryanair" Miliband v David 'Business Class' Cameron The New Labour calculation, bred by a generation in opposition, was always that the end justified the means. The patterns of behaviour - hostile briefing, the corruption of the truth, blackmail, character assassination, and even outright lies - that fell under the catch-all rubric of "spin" were explained away as a necessary corrective to the indiscipline and squeamishness of the 1980s. McBride, as a practising Catholic, must know that this is no excuse. The Catechism is quite clear: "A good intention (for example, that of helping one's neighbour) does not make behaviour that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny, good or just. The end does not justify the means. But spin begat spin. The original mission - to vanquish the Tories - was achieved, and repeated twice in the elections of 2001 and 2005. But what started as a tactic became a way of life, and of death, as the party turned in on itself and the Blairite and Brownite factions fought one another with a venom that even now, seven years to the month that Tony Blair announced he would be standing down, still hisses and fizzes with menace. As Tessa Jowell said on Friday, Ed Miliband - like Ed Balls, a protégé of Brown - must have known, at least in general terms, "that this was going on." But, as Dame Tessa continued, Miliband's strategy is, and must be, to say "we are not going back to that." (In which context, I congratulate my colleague Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor of this newspaper for nine years, on his appointment as Miliband's deputy director of communications. If actions speak louder than words, the Labour leader has indicated that he values integrity and intellect above plots and arm-twisting by recruiting this brilliant journalist.) The themes of Miliband's conference are the right ones for his party. Liam Byrne will unveil his welfare reform strategy, based on extensive grassroots research and the sound principle that the fight against unemployment must be radically localised. Byrne also knows that the Tories are planning to savage the Opposition as the "Welfare Party" in the 2015 election, and that the plan to ditch the "bedroom tax" must be matched by a robustness of spirit elsewhere: Labour has to be the party of job creation, not of benefit bonanzas. If the 2012 conference was given coherence by Miliband's shrewd notion of "One Nation Labour," this gathering has its binding principle in living standards, and the political claim that the headline figures of the recovery bear little relation to the experience of ordinary families trying to make ends meet, find affordable housing, steer their children towards apprenticeships, and pay utility bills. Expect more on the national minimum wage, and an emphasis on Miliband's plan to restore the 10p tax rate. A section of his draft conference speech that has already hit the cutting-room floor framed the point thus: David Cameron & Co, he planned to say, are in Business Class, on the runway, awaiting take-off and deciding between red and white. The rest of us, meanwhile, are stuck in the stuffy Ryanair departure lounge, wondering if we will ever get on board. I'm sure there will be better jokes as he addresses the conference on Tuesday. But you get the idea. So, by the way, do the Tories. It was a founding principle of the Cameroon gang that statistical recovery was not the end of the matter. As far back as November 2005, a few weeks before his election to the leadership, Cameron declared in a speech that "economic liberalism is not enough" without what he called "economic empowerment": a strategy to ensure that access to prosperity was broadened. "We used to say that a rising economic tide lifts all boats," the young moderniser said. Well, that obviously isn't true. In July, George Osborne's first response to the stirrings of recovery was to write a piece for The Times insisting that the revitalised economy had "to work for every family and every region of our country." To adapt Miliband's discarded metaphor: the Tories know that they are in trouble unless the public believes that they and their tribe are in the same single-class Boeing 737 as the rest of us. In it together, to coin a phrase. Other than the Lib Dems" refusal to co-operate in the boundary review - in retaliation for Tory sabotage of Lords reform - this is probably Miliband's strongest hope of victory in 2015. The perception that the PM and his fractious party do not grasp what it is like to be an ordinary citizen is strong, and resiliently so. The centrepiece of last year's Budget was the lifting of two million people out of the income tax system. Yet it was the reduction of the top rate from 50p to 45p - "the millionaires" tax cut" as Miliband named it - that caught the imagination. Though as much a product of the London liberal-academic nexus as Boris Johnson is a child of the Tory party's Eton-Oxford caste, both do best when they present themselves as tribunes squaring up to the elites that allegedly or actually conspire against the people. The problem for Miliband is that the gravitational pull of the past is so strong, and the chains of perceived culpability so hard to shake off. According to a new YouGov poll for the Resolution Foundation, almost twice as many people blame Labour for the fall in living standards of recent years as blame the Conservatives. The same poll found that Miliband's party was also thought to have the best prescriptions to deal with the problem. In politics, as in life, hope struggles with experience. Memory is tinder, crackling once again as the sparks fly from McBride's pen and other forms of ignition. The scale of the flames will do much to determine the Labour leader's fate in Brighton, and beyond.