Ed Miliband's policies are more impulse than strategy Labour leader is authentically leftwing, and was only ever going to seek a leftwing path to power When Martin Amis is asked why he decided on the Holocaust as the subject of his latest novel, he disputes the verb. "One never decides to write a novel," he told an interviewer. It picks you. An author just feels compelled to address a certain topic, he says, and literary critics are mistaken to think choice comes into it. Political commentators make a similar mistake. We write as though politicians decide their message to the electorate. We read "strategy" into everything. In reality, politicians end up doing what they are compelled to by their instincts. They experiment with ideas in moments of trouble but, over a parliamentary term, a party's pitch to voters is ultimately a distillation of its leader's sincere beliefs. And nobody chooses what to believe any more than they choose who to find attractive. Janan Ganesh Tony Blair's critics wasted years deploring his cynical "triangulation" between left and right, only to see in the twilight of his UK premiership that he was a Third Way man to his bones. David Cameron, his successor but one, is a conventional Tory with some liberal trimmings, and governs as such. The difference between decision and compulsion helps clear up what is wrong with Ed Miliband. The Labour leader's ratings have sunk to a pit of aw­fulness that reduces allies to in­sisting he goes down well in small private gatherings (known as the Gordon Brown de­fence). An opposition primed for power would be comfortably ahead in the polls six months before a general election. Labour is no longer ahead at all. Commentators blame his "35 per cent strategy." This alleged blueprint for victory next May involves retaining Labour's core vote - optimistically equated with the 29 per cent the party won in 2010 - and adding some leftwing Liberal Democrats irked by their party's coalition with the Tories. Add the inequities of the electoral system, and this paltry vote share should be enough to give Mr Miliband the seals of office. But it leaves little margin for error, as he is learning the hard way. The critics have half a point. They are right about the "35 per cent" bit but wrong about the "strategy" bit. They talk of it as a conscious calculation gone wrong, like a bad chess move or a pilot misjudging a landing. They assume he would do something different if he had his time again. But Mr Miliband does not have a 35 per cent strategy. He has a 35 per cent world view. He is authentically leftwing and was only ever going to seek a leftwing path to power. His effort to cobble together enough like-minded voters to pull off a slight but doctrinally pure victory is better understood as an urge - what Amis calls a "frisson" - than a decision. And it was not his error to follow this path; it was Labour's error to choose as its leader someone who was always incapable of doing anything else. That leadership campaign four years ago was a miniature of his supposed plan for May. He spent months reinforcing his party's certainties on everything from economics to foreign policy. In a stupor of self-congratulation, Labour elected him - just. Critics accused him of "pandering" and admirers credited him with "guile," but both words, like strategy, imply he did not mean it. He did. Last week Mr Miliband and Harriet Harman, his deputy, grown adults with a combined age of 108 and aspirations to high office, wore T-shirts scrawled with a feminist slogan that looked like the rushed homework of an indifferent GCSE design student. Mr Cameron declined to follow. Mr Blair would have laughed the idea out of the room. It is hard to picture Alistair Darling, the august former chancellor of the exchequer who announced his retirement this week, going along with it. The T-shirt stunt, like the minimalist route to victory in May, is unedifying. But the critics must stop calling these things misjudgments. This is just who Mr Miliband is. He is of the liberal left. He doubtless thinks Russell Brand, the celebrity anti-capitalist, "has a point." The election will tell us whether people like this amount to 35 per cent of the electorate or, as the polls are beginning to hint, quite a bit less.