I thought Iain Duncan-Smith would be the worst Leader of the Opposition I ever experienced.  Wholly lacking in personality, gravitas, communication skills or the indefinable leadership ‘X factor’, his only redeeming feature was that he was a fully paid up member of the Toryscum and his maladroit tenure was therefore amusing to me.

Edward Samuel Miliband has, however, romped clear in the race to be the least competent and most clueless holder of the office.  The distance Miliband – a man so inept I can’t even be bothered to think of a soubriquet for him – has put between himself and the likes of Duncan-Smith, Howard and Foot resembles nothing so much as the way Shergar drew clear of the field in the 1981 Derby.

Miliband’s campaign for the leadership was pathetic insofar as he sought to claim that the calamaties of the Bliar and Arrivederci Years were nothing to do with him.  That untrue, self-serving claim ensured he did not get my vote.

Interestingly, of course, he didn’t win the vote of MPs and MEPs.

He didn’t win the vote of party members, either.

While I am in favour of both trades unions and proportional representation, you do have to wonder whether everything is entirely rosy in the garden when a candidate who lost two of the three electoral colleges on offer still wins the election.

I’ve given him as much time and cut him as much slack as I could.  But while I largely decry the knee-jerk reactionism so beloved of rolling news channels, there is also a point at which you have to accept that things are not working out and that persevering with the status quo will do more damage in the longer-term than the short-term damage of changing leaders for a second time in twelve months.

The way politicians sound and look matters.  It shouldn’t matter – and certainly not as much as what they say and do – but it does.  And Miliband sounds and looks dreadful.  For wont of a better description, he looks and sounds floppy.  While having the charisma of a breeze block didn’t stop John Major, at least he was not handicapped by also being ill-at-ease with himself and others.

So, awkward and floppy.  It’s not much of a selling point, is it?

And the electorate can’t help but draw an unfavourable conclusion in comparison with the presidential swagger and unrelenting smoooooothness offered by PBD. (LL Cool D, anyone?)

That Bloody Woman and Bliar were lucky Prime Ministers in that they faced (largely) awful Leaders of the Opposition at most of the elections they fought.  If we hope to have a welfare state, a state education system and an NHS to leave to our children, we can’t repeat that mistake.  We have to put up a vertebrate against them.

The final straw for me came with Miliband’s abysmal decision to call for Kenneth Clarke’s resignation last month.  Clarke fucked up during one radio call-in, fair enough, but anybody who has actually paid any attention to British politics over the past 30 years knows that Clarke is one of the last Toryscum standing on whom social democrats should not automatically urinate.

Miliband’s judgement was abysmal on the day of Clarke’s problems, but I might have been able to overlook it had he not compounded the problem 48 hours later by publishing a pitiful attempt at self-justification in The Independent (effectively the only ‘quality’ newspaper left to the Minister until Harry Potter is finally sacked for bankrupting The Guardian).

He could have just moved on and hoped that everyone would forget.  But he didn’t.  In a lovely little microcosm encapsulating his entire time in office, his judgement was awful and his performance worse.  He stood limply at the despatch box savaging Clarke like a dead squirrel and then awkwardly spewed anaemic, nonsensical drivel in the direction of news microphones and newspaper column typesetters.  It was only marginally less infuriating than it was embarrassing.

(I’m not going to waste everyone’s time by repeating again the various arguments about why Clarke should have rightly been called for his poor use of language in espousing a perfectly sensible penal policy proposal and then left to get on with it.  I will, however, observe that Miliband’s limp posturing almost certainly resulted in that policy being spiked.  So well done, Ed.  Fucking brilliant work.)

For the record, I voted for Ed Balls in the Labour leadership ballot.  I don’t care whether or not he’s a nice guy: he is undoubtedly the best performing senior Labour politician against the Eton Trifles.  He gets under their skin; he gets at them; he gets to the point; he gets that point across.  The contrast with Edward Samuel Miliband could scarcely be starker.

Anyway, enough whining about nonentities.  Typography For Lawyers has just landed on my desk.  And I may have just wet myself a little bit.