Ed Miliband has not forgotten how the Conservatives warned the public he would bring “chaos” if he was elected – and now he’s brought the insult back.
The former Labour leader lost the 2015 general election to David Cameron, and resigned shortly afterwards to be succeeded by Jeremy Corbyn.
It was a particularly brutal time for Miliband.
Cameron repeatedly told voters throughout his election campaign: “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband.”
On top of that, he was mocked for eating a bacon sandwich.
Now the shadow climate change secretary, Miliband was unsurprisingly one of the first to crow about the latest disasters in government.
He trawled through Cameron’s Twitter feed, going back seven years to find that famous tweet about “chaos” with Miliband – and then retweeted it, attached with a simple caption: just the clown face emoji.
It had more than 50,000 likes less than an hour after it was first posted on Friday.
He then added another reply, which read: “The fever that has taken over the Tory party didn’t start with Liz Truss. Trickle down economics has been the guiding philosophy for 12 years. It has failed.”
The Conservative government under Liz Truss has certainly struggled, with her mini budget causing chaos on the market, the decline of the pound and emergency interventions from the Bank of England within just over five weeks.
It’s also worth remembering that Cameron resigned as prime minister just a year after the 2015 general election, after his campaign to remain in the EU failed and the UK voted to leave in the referendum.
His successor, Theresa May, tried to adopt the same sort of mantra when she called a general election in 2017, by promoting “strong and stable leadership” over Labour. She won – but only narrowly.