Show of unity planned as sharks circle Ed Miliband

Shadow cabinet ministers are waking up to the idea that, whether they like it or not, they are now stuck with Ed Miliband as their leader until after the next general election. That message will be reinforced tomorrow, the Mole hears, with a show of unity to their adenoidal leader after a special shadow cabinet meeting at Labour's Victoria Street headquarters.

Normally the shadow cabinet meets in the Shadow Cabinet Room, but Ed Miliband has called them to party headquarters to thrash out a fightback strategy. And they will all be expected to give a show of support to his leadership when they emerge from the meeting.

It's panic stations because of yesterday's flood of Sunday paper 'revelations'. They included a Sunday Times YouGov poll saying 41 per cent of Labour voters believe it was a mistake to elect Ed rather than David; an Independent report suggesting David was itching to take over from his hopeless younger brother; and the Mail's serialisation of a biography of Ed which claims a bitter feud still exists between the Miliband boys.

As a result, the atmosphere around the shadow cabinet picked up by the Mole is fatalistic. The message to Ed Miliband is that he has got to pull his finger out. But there is no mood to dump him a year after he beat his brother to Labour's tarnished crown.

"It's very frustrating. We all recognise that it's very hard for Ed to make a mark with all this going on, but there's no appetite for doing anything other than giving him our strongest support,'' said a shadow cabinet minister who ran against both brothers last year. "We have got to come out fighting the Tories, not each other. Ed needs a few strong, bold policy announcements to get us back on top of events."

Labour List blogger Mark Ferguson helpfully warned his party leader: "There is blood in this water Ed. And there are sharks and piranhas too - so you've got two choices, swim fast or stop the bleeding. No more treading water."

Another shadow cabinet minister said: "He has got my full support. Everyone in the shadow cabinet wants him to succeed. But he has got to define himself more."

But will Ed help his case with the keynote speech he has planned today, in which he is due to attack both bankers and benefit cheats? That is just the sort of muddled message that has got his team in despair and pointing fingers at his ex-Times spin doctor, Tom Baldwin.

Both brothers have emerged damaged and bloodied from the fresh round of fratricide. There was some sympathy for David after he was stabbed in the back last year by his brother and there was a growing 'if only we had chosen David' mood on the Labour benches. But all that has now been spent.

Ed may been seen as an awkward geek, portrayed in the new book by James Macintyre and Mehdi Hasan as a weird bloke who at university preferred politics and chocolate bars to drugs, rock and roll and girls, and could do the Rubik's cube in 1 minute 20 seconds, but David has emerged as rude, arrogant, and disliked by the vast majority of Labour MPs who voted for him.

One MP told how he had given the older Miliband a lift, only to be ignored as David spent the journey speaking to more important people on his phone. When he dropped him off there was not a word of thanks. Such stories about David's rudeness could fill another book.

Shadow cabinet ministers are seriously pissed-off with David over the leaking last week of the 'speech that never was' to the Guardian - the speech that David Miliband was to have made to the party conference last year, if he had won.

That bit of freelance plotting backfired badly on David and his gang of cheerleaders who are seen by shadow cabinet members as the culprits for the leak. Even if it was done without his knowledge or approval, it is seen as a deliberate move to destabilise Ed's leadership.

Diane Abbott spoke for the rest when she said there were some in David's camp who "could still not accept" that David had lost.

That is why David was forced on Sunday to come out with such a strong message of support for his brother and a denial that he was behind any plot to unseat him.

However, David still shows no sign of actually helping his brother by joining his front-bench team and there is now a total lack of trust at the top of the Labour party between the two brothers' camps.

The next election would be David Cameron's on a plate were it not for the internal feud he faces with Tory rebels who can't stomach his readiness to give in to his Lib Dem coalition partner Nick Clegg, as evidenced by today's retreat on NHS reforms.

The only person to emerge smiling from the weekend is the old bruiser Lord Prescott. He was quoted in the Sunday Times as one of the party "grandees" sniping at Ed's leadership for rubbishing Labour's past record.

Prescott fired off a barrage of Twitter messages to protest his innocence, leading to a tweeted apology from the Sunday Times who said that the quote had wrongly been attributed to him through a "production error".

Prescott's 'kill' campaign must be a Twitter first - and one that Ed could learn from. ·