Over the weekend Nicolas Maduro, socialist president of Venezuela, announced that he was forcing a local chain of electronics stores to sell its products at cheaper prices. Maduro is now seeking the power to extend this policy to other goods, in an attempt to “protect the people from the bourgeois parasites”. Maybe it’s true after all, I mused to myself on hearing the news: Ed Miliband really is setting the political agenda.
I thought no further about it until I read Andrew Rawnsley’s fascinating account in the Observer of how Labour insiders see Mr Miliband’s standing and prospects. One party strategist’s summation of public attitudes to the leader was particularly striking: “If people are exposed to two minutes of Ed, they go, ‘Oh, it’s that weird intellectual with the Marxist dad again’. If they are exposed to twenty minutes of him, people go, ‘He’s much better than we expected. This guy is worth listening to.’”
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