"But also, the trick to managing broad and heterogenous coalitions of voters is to stick firmly to those issues that they all agree are important and all agree on the solution and on which you can make progress and to avoid talking about anything else."

That's great until someone else starts talking about the anything else, and prodding you about it in public. At which point you go ah, um a lot. As happened to Forbes yesterday when interviewed about gay rights. How much support they lose over that kind of thing will be interesting to see. People can always shift over to The Greens, after all.

And yes, I think that Labour can get a lot of traction for the first couple of years just by not being as appallingly incompetent as the Conservatives. And can probably get a bounce at the following election using the method I outlined a few days ago. But, as seen with the Blair administration, once you've got a functional economy people tend to disagree about the rest of things, and the disagreements set in, and you start losing voters to other parties.