See the Happy Warrior.
Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2015 11:40 pm
Ed Miliband faced ridicule last night after privately billing himself as the ‘happy warrior’ ahead of last week’s televised Election debate.
The Labour leader’s secret cribsheets also reveal how he planned to ‘relish the chance to show who I am’. And in handwritten notes, Mr Miliband appears to exhort himself to ‘use the people at home’.
Embarrassingly for the Labour leader, the ten pages of notes were apparently left behind in the Salford ITV studios where Mr Miliband clashed with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and four other party leaders.
One note appears to explain why Mr Miliband smiled serenely every time he came under fire. It read: ‘Happy warrior, calm, never agitated.’
Last night, Labour sources suggested that was a reference to the poem The Character Of The Happy Warrior by William Wordsworth.
But the notes also betray the vital importance for the Labour leader of landing a blow on the Prime Minister – and contrasting himself with Mr Cameron.
He wrote ‘me versus DC’, followed by ‘decency, principle and values’.
In a further self-motivational message, Mr Miliband also wrote the words ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ connected by an arrow.
The Labour leader’s notes also reveal that several of his most successful ripostes were carefully scripted in advance.
For example, after Mr Cameron reminded the Labour leader of his alleged plan to ‘weaponise’ the NHS, Mr Miliband’s quickfire retort – ‘I would say to everybody at home: Use your vote as a weapon to fight for the future of the health service’ – was drawn virtually word for word from his notes.
