The Labour leader is in a fighting mood despite a supposed crisis stemming from party discontent over his leadership
For a man supposedly gripped by his first leadership crisis and bombarded by conflicting advice from friend and foe, Ed Miliband exudes an extraordinary aura of calm. As well as solving a Rubik's cube in 90 seconds, he watched most of The Killing over Christmas with his wife (that is near 20 hours worth of viewing) and has been mesmerised by the heroine's anti-hero persona.
His office itself is an oasis of calm while outside Labour bloggers, tweeters, former gurus and shadow ministers bewail a leadership vacuum and bombard Miliband with counsel – to offer surprises, be more policy specific, adopt fiscal conservatism, reject neoliberalism, drop oppositionalism, abandon social democratic abstractions, change his persona. The 2012 wishlist is very long and not always coherent.
Through this new year flurry, Miliband himself has been silent, appearing only off camera when he made a call to Diane Abbott on Thursday as she was being interviewed by Sky News about her "racism" gaffe on Twitter.
He starts the interview laconically – "I gather there has been some stuff in the newspapers" – before conceding this is a tough moment for the party, and perhaps for him personally: "We are in the hard yards of opposition. We have taken the hard course, not the line of least resistance. I think it is a fight. I always knew it was going to be a fight. It is one I relish, I never expected it to be anything else so I am pretty phlegmatic about what appears in newspapers.
"It is what this job is about. You get advice, you get people criticising you, even your supposed gurus. It is an audition for being prime minister, which is the most difficult job in the country.
"You discover things about yourself in this job, which is that I am someone of real steel and grit, which is why I stood for the job in the first place when many people said I should not."
He denies he has allowed a dangerous vacuum to develop through a sense of caution or reluctance to set out policyspecifics. His self-image is not that of a man of caution: "Look, I am the guy who took on Murdoch," he says. "That was a decisive thing to do. I am the guy that has said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change.
"What is the most important thing for a leader of the opposition to have? It is to establish an argument about what is wrong with the country and what needs to change. I have a very clear plan and I have set out very clear themes – the squeezed middle, young people and the next generation, responsibility at the top and at the bottom – and it has been brought together under 'responsible capitalism'."
He says he never expected Labour to be chalking up big poll leads at this point in the parliament, saying: "We got our second worst result since universal suffrage in 2010. We are now in the high 30s in the polls and that means we have put on 10% since the election."
So how cross is he with someone such as Lord Glasman, ennobled by Miliband, who claimed he appears to exhibit "no strategy, no narrative and little energy", as Glasman did this week?
Miliband defends his decision to elevate Glasman, saying: "Maybe it is the style of leader I am. I thought he was an interesting guy. He is going to have things to say," adding, with a chuckle: "I knew I was not going to like some of it. He is not a politician. I don't want to sound totally zen-like on this. I would prefer it if it had not happened, but get over it. Most people on the doorstep are not talking about where Maurice Glasman is. I have not seen him for a bit."
But he stops short of dismissing all the criticism of his leadership as froth and nonsense, arguing that some of the uneasiness stems from the fact thatLabour is grappling with a profound moment of economic and political transition.
"Labour people are coming to terms with the fact that the financial crisis did not just have huge implications for Britain, it also had big implications for our politics," he says. "I think what you see in a number of debates in the Labour party is how do we come to terms – which I don't think we adequately did in government – with the financial crisis and what it means for us. What has social democracy been about in Britain and in Europe perhaps since Tony Crosland? It is about tax and transfer social democracy. Crosland said 'use the proceeds of growth to make society better and fairer'.
"The most successful architects of that were [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown. That was the terms of trade. That is what they did between 1997 and 2010 – new schools new hospitals, tax credits – that is not going to be available to the next Labour government . The Blair-Brown route is not available to us. Social democrats are facing problems with this all round the world – difficult times don't automatically mean social democracy wins.
"The issue we are going to have to be talking about in the coming months is, what does this all mean for Labour in 2014-15 ? How are we going to make our society fairer in a world where there is less money around? That is the central challenge facing the next Labour government. It is the kernel of what I stand for."
He insists he has already made two hard choices as leader. "The first was not to go down the Tory road of the 1930s approach of saying there is nothing that can be done and, in the short term, unemployment is going to go up and growth is going to be very sluggish and that is the way it is. If we did that we would be Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden [two Labour leaders in the recession] and we are not going to be that. The parallels with the 1930s are not exact, but in the 30s there were very few people around willing to say the consensus is wrong, and the establishment was desperate, as it is now, to say to us just go along with the consensus.
"The second hard choice we have made is to say the way we run the economy has got to change, that is the point of my responsible capitalism agenda."
He insists that was a bold decision of the kind he is often asked to make. "It was a risk. Someone in my office said to me: 'I don't know what happens when the leader of the opposition comes along and says we have got to change the economic assumptions of the past 30 years in his first conference speech'."
The conversation quickly turns to the economy and why Labour has still not regained trust, even though the Tories have had to admit their economic plan is off-track and living standards are being severely squeezed. A ComRes poll on Thursday found that, although most people thought the prime minister had lost control of the economy, only 15% trusted Miliband, while 39% trusted Cameron. Even more people trust Nick Clegg than Ed Balls with the economy.
Miliband says he is not surprised, 18 months into a parliament. "There has been a global financial crisis which happened when Labour was in power. We have always said we share our responsibility for things we did not get right like bank regulation. But I think the government is losing the argument, and we have not yet won it. My sense is that they are developing an economic record of their own and people are slightly fed up with them blaming the past or the euro."
He vigorously defends shadow chancellor Ed Balls from "the straw man charge", that he only offers a Keynesian prescription of extra spending. "Ed is the guy that invented the spending freeze 1997-98."
But he admits the argument has been "concertinaed" in that "the Conservatives have been shown demonstrably to be failing even on their own terms, such as borrowing more quickly than people expected and that has led inevitably to more scrutiny on us.
"It is ridiculous to suggest there are some people at the top of the party that favour fiscal credibility, and there are people that do not. In the 1990s, Blair and Brown spent a lot of time recognising that Labour had a big job to do on economic trust and Ed and I recognise the exact same issue."
He said he totally endorsed the shadow defence secretary, Jim Murphy, setting out his spending reduction plans in defence as he did in the Guardian: "It is exactly what Ed said he wanted shadow ministers to do – to show that we do not oppose all the cuts. There are lots of cuts we are not going to be able to reverse. That is the way it is. To say otherwise would not be credible."
But he rejects the argument that the vagueness of Labour's framework inhibits his party receiving a wider hearing, a point argued by some in the shadow cabinet and in pamphlets such as "In the Black".
He criticises the government's own forward-looking rolling five-year fiscal rule, but will not at this stage offer an alternative. "We have already said we need new fiscal rules, but there is a right time to do that: there are no quick fixes in opposition. This process of restoring Labour's economic reputation and winning the economic argument takes time. It is an incredibly important task, not something that takes place in six months or a year. We – Ed and I – get this more than anyone that this is an important task for Labour. I don't think David Cameron and George Osborne set out their fiscal rules until a few months before the election. I just don't agree there is a vacuum."
He denies he may be in danger of letting his responsible capitalism agenda to slip from his grasp as Cameron and Nick Clegg take up the issue of executive pay. He recalls the phrase "first they ignore you, then they say it is mad and then they all agree with you". He adds: "I promise you they are not going to steal a march on us in this area. If one of the big battlegrounds of British politics is going to be who is really going to take action on executive pay, I say 'bring it on'.
"Does anyone really believe David Cameron came into politics to create a more responsible capitalism? The public are not going to buy it. On the energy companies, we say take action to reform the energy markets, they say cut subsidies for the solar industry; take the train companies, we say we will take action to stop them ripping customers off, they say the opposite. On the banks, they say cut taxes for the banks, we say use the money to cut tuition fees. It is totally implausible for Cameron to be the architect of responsible capitalism. Doubtless his focus groups are telling him the issue is a big deal, but that is it."
But is this talk of responsible capitalism too abstract, liable to play well in the seminar room, but not on the doorstep? "This agenda is absolutely concrete. The handrails of this are short-termism in the City, the wider relationship between finance and industry, it is about taking on vested interests, it is about responsibility of employers for jobs and skills, and it is about the top, and their share of wealth and income. That is how you hard wire fairness into the economy. It is an argument I relish and I am pretty confident I can win it."