Editing Ed Milliband's look

Picture from Flikr: Net_efekt

I'm trying to work out why Dave Cameron looks so much more authoritative than Ed Milliband. We have to attribute some of this to Milliband's inexperience of course; he probably wasn't expecting to win his current job until a matter of days ago and he's been leader only for three working days. I've been watching him making his first major speech as leader.

Cameron somehow manages to wear a suit better even once you've taken the inexperience into account. If I were a Milliband advisor here's what I'd suggest:

1. Change the hair somehow. The little bit of gelled hair sticking up is of course commonplace but if, like Milliband, you have a sloping chin it's just going to make everyone think of Beaker from the Muppet Show. What? That's just me? OK, fair enough.

2. The choice of tie could change quite usefully. Not that it's a bad thing to avoid the Party colours, since most politicians do so, but this one seemed to have a yellow stripy thing going on underneath it. If it's going to be stripy, fine, stripes are good - but on the surface please, don't distract me while I try to make it out. It might leave me thinking the speech is less interesting than the clothes.

3. The jacket. I know he was wearing a well-tailored and immaculately fitting, crease-free jacket. And I know Tony Blair did the taking-the-jacket-off-to-look-as-though-you-mean-business thing to death. But looking at Max Atkinson's blog on dressing to make an impression (the bit on jackets is some way down) removing it does seem to make a difference. Milliband looked to me like a young man trying to look more serious than he actually is by keeping the jacket on - another time he might want to consider removing it as he's done in the picture above, taken from Flikr.

That's what I'd have changed anyway - I'll leave the political bloggers to dissect the content!