Why aren’t the Tories taking advantage of Labour’s continued problems?

The Conservative party were supposed to be ahead by now.

Going into the final recess of this parliament and with the time to the General Election now measured in weeks rather than months, their two electoral advantages should’ve come good.

In their favour firstly is the fact that the economy is improving, according to the statistics at any rate.

Secondly, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, looks and acts like a gonk.

Labour MPs complain that their strategists in Westminster don’t realise just how hard it is on the doorsteps trying to sell the idea of Ed M PM.

And yet Labour retain a stubborn lead in almost every poll. It’s slim and if it was just one poll then it would be insignificant but the red team are out in front, for now. All of which must be doubly dispiriting for the Conservatives given the ineptitude of the Labour operation.

One of the keys to the success of Tony Blair’s New Labour was the establishment of a “rapid rebuttal unit” damping down the sparks of a bad news story before it could catch fire.

Ed Miliband has something similar but when it comes to rebuttal it does anything but. Time and again in recent weeks problems that could have been foreseen have not been.

First there was the controversy over his remark that he wanted to “weaponise” the NHS.

This was made in private to BBC political editor Nick Robinson who’s done little to undo Labour suspicion of him as a very active Young Conservative and former member of the Oxford University Conservative Association by making the comment public.

But instead of coming out fighting, admitting it, squishing it or turning it to his advantage, Miliband just mumbled that he couldn’t remember what he’d said like a schoolboy caught swearing at the lollipop lady.

Last week there was the brief flurry of nun-gate when Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt, alumni of the New Labour rapid rebuttal unit, appeared to disrespect women in wimples.

The issue should’ve vanished as fast as snow on an Austrian mountain top in spring. Instead it stuck around like a show tune from The Sound of Music planted in your head.

This week’s obvious problem was the unveiling of a big pink van to spearhead Labour’s women’s campaign.

Given a number of Labour members have spoken out in support of the excellent PinkStinks campaign that seeks to undo the bisection of childhood into pink for girls and blue for boys, it looked absurd to put Harriet Harman behind the wheel of a battlebus decked out in patronising pink.

Labour’s response was first that it wasn’t pink, it was cerise or maybe scarlet depending on who you spoke to.

Then they claimed that actually it was the same colour as all Labour literature and backdrops for the current campaign.

The best response was one they didn’t even offer. With so many parties in this campaign and each having their own colour blue, red, green, purple, yellow, gold are all taken and black would’ve made it look like Harman’s hearse there’s not a lot left to choose from other than pink.

If they really wanted to attract women to their cause they should of course have plastered a picture of Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna on the side of the van. David Cameron described him as “coy” at Prime Minister’s Questions this week.

An image of part-time model Umunna looking coy passing the window would’ve had women flooding from their doorsteps and desks to lay siege to the battlebus.

The worry for Labour is that they didn’t see their problems coming.

On the plus side, despite their difficulties, they remain ahead in the polls. And with the advent of fixed-term parliaments they know just how long they have to fix their operation.

Not long. It remains to be seen if it’s long enough.