With his party ahead in opinion polls eight months before an election, opposition leader Ed Miliband could be Britain’s next prime minister. Yet his Labour party is in the odd position of trying to win power although, not thanks to him.

An Opinium/Observer poll released yesterday after his party’s conference, the last before May’s national election, showed Labour’s lead over Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives had been cut to two percentage points, down six points in a fortnight, after Miliband forgot vital parts of his speech.

Labour leader is derided by the press as a socially awkward nerd

Derided by the press as a socially awkward nerd, Miliband, an Oxford-educated career politician with the demeanour of an academic, is seen by some in and around his party as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

“If they (Labour) win, they’re winning it in spite of him,” Peter Simpson, a worker for a non-governmental organisation who last week attended Labour’s annual conference in Manchester, northern England, told Reuters.

“Everyone is worried about real core issues like the National Health Service and the Conservatives being seen to be in the pockets of the rich. They’ll win it because of that, not because of Miliband. If anything he could lose it for them.”

Anxious to defuse his image problem, something that has dogged him since he won the party leadership in 2010, Miliband took the unusual step of publicly mocking his own image in July, saying he rejected “a politics driven by image”.