By Sam Macrory - 8th June 2011
The manoeuvre sounds straightforward enough.
Identify the vehicle (which probably has sirens and bells on the top), jump aboard, and take over the wheel.
But securing a sure footing on a bandwagon, let alone driving one, is clearly harder than it looks.
Ed Miliband lurched from one to another at prime minister's questions today, leaping across in an ungraceful lurch that would have left most stuntmen looking away in horror.
A string of morning press cuttings constructed the first easily identifiable bandwagon: the apparent ditching of Ken Clarke's justice reforms.
"He has torn up the justice secretary's policy – why?" Miliband began, in that slightly hushed not-angry-but-just-disappointed tone. The prime minister didn't even bother providing a relevant answer.
"Has he torn it up – yes or no?" Miliband tried again.
David Cameron replied that Miliband should do something more useful than read the newspapers, which seems a little unfair.
After all, that's half the job of the leader of the opposition.
The PM then threw out a quote from Labour's justice spokesman Sadiq Khan, apparently praising the now stalled reforms.
Reforms which may not have been torn up at all and might come back? It didn’t really matter.
Clarke, a few seats down and looking as ruffled as ever – a cunning look to disguise whether that reported prime ministerial dressing down had been administered or not - could have slept his way through the questioning, so painless was this experience proving.
"Why the u-turn?" Cameron snapped, throwing at Miliband the charge which Cameron had been roundly accused of throughout the morning: somehow the Labour leader had found himself driving his first bandwagon off a cliff after just two questions.
Time to leap across to the frantic re-writing of the NHS reforms, a far more reliable vehicle.
But the Number 10 briefing team had done its job again, with Cameron unveiling that stock quote from John Healey, Labour's shadow health secretary, in support of the government's proposed reforms.
Reforms which are being paused and rewritten and may yet return? But that didn't matter either, and once again the prime minister hardly bothered to provide a ringing personal endorsement either way.
Miliband, said Cameron, was "not in charge of his ship" and the bandwagon, he declared, "had hit the buffers."
And a nasty mess it caused too: Labour MPs were looking far from happy with Miliband's driving skills, with a number of his frontbenchers seemingly happier to chat across the despatch box to their supposed opponents than cheer their leader back on course.
"You can’t trust the Tories on the NHS", was Miliband's parting shot; over-used, not strong enough, and hardly one to make headlines - whereas something memorable on Clarke would have.
The missed opportunities were made all the more stark when Philip Hollobone, a Tory backbencher, managed to force - as Miliband hadn't - the prime minister into giving the dreaded vote of confidence to Ken Clarke.
Hollobone asked a spiky question about magistrates being made to retire at 70, "when the lord chancellor will be 71 this year".
Clarke barely flinched – sniping from the likes of Hollobone doesn't register on his radar.
The PM, however, felt the dig was worthy of a response. "He is doing a superb job," Cameron said of Clarke. "And there is plenty more fuel in his tank."
Clarke chuckled, Tories cheered, and Labour MPs crumpled.
Their leader had been presented with fully-loaded bandwagons pointing straight at the prime minister, and somehow he had struggled to even climb aboard.
Right now, Ed Miliband is a political leader without a bandwagon of his own, and one in urgent need of a little refuelling.
Sam Macrory is political editor of The House Magazine.
Have your say...
Please enter your comments below.