Miliband vs business leaders – a PR disaster for the Labour leader

Slanging matches in the run-up to the election aren’t the way to win votes

It’s no use Ed Miliband saying he can’t recall saying ‘weaponise’, he needs to show a killer instinct (PA) (PA)

A man goes into a chemist's shop. “Have you got any rat poison?” he asks.

“No,” comes the reply, “but have you tried Boots?”

“I want to poison them,” he says, “not kick them to death.”

This is the only joke I know about Boots the Chemist, and it is - admittedly very tangentially - rather topical. Boots is in the news, and, wittingly or not, its chief executive has injected a poison into the national discourse in the run-up to the May 7 election. His suggestion that a Labour victory would be catastrophic brought to the fore a newly toxic relationship between the Leader of the Opposition and some of Britain's leading businessmen.

Given a voice by newspapers of a right-wing bent, and egged on by the Conservatives, prominent businessmen are falling over themselves to get hold of the megaphone and give Ed Milliband a good old kicking. It is hard to imagine that, at any other time in the electoral cycle, the Daily Mail would clear the front page to report the self-interested musings of the former boss of Marks and Sparks. Sir Stuart Rose opposes Labour's mooted rises in National Insurance and corporation tax. Quelle surprise!

This time it's personal. It is entirely in Tory supporters' interests to characterise Mr Miliband as a Marxist-Leninist radical, antagonistic towards business and a throwback to the three-day week. And thus far Mr Miliband's only recourse to these attacks is to hurl some mud of his own: you don't pay your full whack of taxes, so shut up. To those in the British electorate who have no stomach for the minutiae of political in-fighting - ie almost everyone - and get their news only from headlines, soundbites and well-practised caricatures, this sounds less like electioneering, more like despatches from the frontline of class war.

Is this what we have to look forward to? All heat, no light, and weeks of insults being lobbed across the barricades. This latest skirmish will, I'm afraid, set the tone for much of the campaign, and Mr Miliband is fighting an unequal battle. The most powerful newspapers will present him as a hapless, loony left incompetent.

The depressing thing is that he offers them an open goal. What kind of PR adviser suggested his response to the Boots chief executive was to confront him head-on? The first impulse in such situations is to keep your trap shut. The second should be to make a measured response, or to persuade others (ok, maybe not Ed Balls) to get your message across.

Nowhere in the PR manual does it say: pick a powerful enemy, take him on head-to-head in a personal way, and have no regard to the consequences. Mr Miliband might have had right on his side in pointing out the tax-exile status of the Boots man, but surely he could see what would come next. A circling of wagons, or rather of chauffeur-driven Mercs, and a consistent retort: Boots employs 70,000 British taxpayers: their chief executive is entitled to voice an opinion. You can't really argue with that. And thus Ed Miliband breaches the most important rule of politics, PR and indeed life: don't pick a fight you can't win.