Edlock

Over the weekend, union leader Len McCluskey and millions of others watched, horrified, as their beloved Ed Miliband committed political suicide... or so it seemed.

McCluskey stood in the street and saw – he swears he saw – Miliband throw himself from the heights of a two- or three-point lead in the opinion polls and fall, fatally, onto the pavement of austerity.

A sudden throng of spin doctors prevented McCluskey from reaching Miliband’s broken leadership, but an autopsy performed by Ed Balls confirmed that Labour’s public-spending strategy was indeed dead, having sustained a lethal series of cuts.

And yet...

Why would Miliband have jumped, just as his arch-enemy Cameron’s plans to lay the country waste with a few short lines of economic policy were becoming exposed as a sham? Were other sinister figures putting pressure on him? Had he been told that Blairite assassins stood ready to kill his dear Labour party if he didn’t sacrifice his own position?

And then there’s the question of whether Miliband really did it. Surely he would have avoided such a grim ending at all costs. And surely a genius who can become party leader despite getting fewer votes from the party’s members could think of a way out of a pickle like this.

Could Miliband have put a mask of his own face onto the body of a suspiciously overhyped former “senior adviser” who disappeared from the Labour party that same weekend?

Could Balls – known to have a soft spot for stimulus spending – have faked the evidence?

Could there be a clue in the Labour protestations that their acceptance of cuts is about what happens after the next election, not before? Could Harriet Harman’s “we're not accepting austerity cuts; we are totally opposed to them” give the game away?

Could Miliband’s estranged older brother be somehow involved?

Could McCluskey have been drugged to distort his perception of reality?

Only time will tell.