Ed Miliband interview: Labour leader explains why he's confident he'll be prime minister

“We are making the weather,” Ed Miliband smiles as he lists the issues on which he claims Labour has set the election agenda – zero hours contracts, non-doms, fiscal responsibility, the NHS.

Yet a cloud hangs stubbornly over the man who could be prime minister in just over two weeks: he might need to rely on the Commons votes of the Scottish National Party to win power and survive in the post. If the Conservatives get their way, the “SNP factor” will block Mr Miliband’s path to Downing Street and allow David Cameron to remain there.

In an interview with The Independent, Mr Miliband is adamant that what he calls Mr Cameron’s “desperate” scare tactics about a post-election Labour-SNP deal will not work. “I think people will see through this,” he insists. “David Cameron is playing fast and loose with the integrity of the UK. There is only one party standing up for the integrity of the UK and that is us.”

Reports to Mr Miliband from Labour’s ground troops show the party doing well in the crucial Labour-Tory marginals. Officials tell him the “SNP factor” is not scaring voters away from Labour in England. But, as we travel on the Labour leader’s battlebus from Preston to Manchester at the end of another gruelling 18-hour day, his spin doctors do battle with the broadcasters on their mobile phones. Labour does not want Sir John Major’s speech, warning that the SNP could hold Labour to ransom, to dominate the morning bulletins. The spinners accuse the BBC of re-running the same story for days, as they fight for Mr Miliband’s speech on the NHS to get top or equal billing.

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It is a microcosm of how the election campaign has turned. Even if the Tory blitz is not frightening English voters, at the very least it is drowning out Labour’s message on the issues it wants to fight on. So far, Labour’s “health week” has had to share the headlines with the spectre of an SNP-Labour deal.

Mr Miliband brands the Tories’ attack as their “last throw of the dice” after their other tactics failed - running on the economy; attacking him personally and spraying around what he calls £25bn unfunded spending commitments. He describes Mr Cameron as a “one-club golfer” who will not talk about the choice facing voters on May 7, only about what might happen in a hung parliament afterwards. “You have got a prime minister and ex-prime minister [Sir John Major] trying to set England against Scotland and boost a nationalist party,” he says.

Mr Miliband declines to go further than his cautious formula of saying Labour would not join a formal coalition with the SNP – which Nicola Sturgeon is not seeking in any case. He deflects questions about an unofficial pact, arguing that it would be up to the SNP to decide whether to support a Labour Queen’s Speech.

Would it be an “illegitimate” government if Labour won fewer seats than the Tories but could secure a Commons majority with SNP votes? “I am not getting into hypotheticals,” he says. “A lot of people [in Scotland] are still making up their mind, and starting to focus on whether to gamble on getting rid of a Conservative government with the SNP, or decide they want the guarantee of a Labour government.”

Could the SNP surge deprive Labour of power? He comes close to saying it. “It is certainly true that one less Labour MP in Scotland makes the dangers of putting the Conservatives back in more significant…If you want a Labour government, you should vote Labour.”

Inevitably, Mr Miliband would rather talk about health. But is Labour’s performance on its home ground being hampered by the Tories’ pledge to inject another £8bn a year into the NHS by 2020? Mr Miliband argues the opposite is true – he is “incredibly comfortable” with his party’s position. Firstly, he can contrast his fully-costed £2.5bn NHS plan with a “dangerous” promise by the Tories, as they cannot say where a penny of their £8bn will come from. Secondly, the rival offers underline Labour’s commitment to fiscal discipline, he claims. “One of the most significant things that has happened in this campaign is that the Tories have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility,” he says. “They are a desperate party, making unfunded promises.”

Yet some Labour figures believe he needs to enhance the party’s economic credentials by doing more than merely pledge to clear the deficit “as soon as possible” before 2020. He rejects the idea of setting a firm date. “Setting an arbitrary timetable – as George Osborne did, making a promise and breaking a promise – is not the right way for fiscal credibility. We have a clear framework.” He does believe that “in some respects”, the centre of political gravity has shifted leftwards since the financial crisis – on bank regulation, energy markets and tax avoidance. But he concedes that, on other issues – such as spending – it has shifted to the right.

Mr Miliband is calm and confident, yet the SNP cloud threatens to overshadow a personal success in which he has confounded the Tories’ attempt to portray him as “weak and weird,” and his personal ratings have risen (admittedly, from a low base).

“I always thought that once we got to this campaign, it would be a chance to speak in a direct way to the British people about how I wanted to change the country,” he says. He will let others judge his apparent transformation. “I am the same person I was three months ago,” he says, adding that his maxim is to “concentrate on your own game.”

He claims Labour is making the running, forcing the Tories to change tack: “There is a dynamic in election campaigns. They [the Tories] are shrivelling where their ground is, we are expanding our ground. Those who do that tend to be winning campaigns.”

Although all party leaders must say they are “enjoying” the campaign, you sense that Mr Miliband really means it. As an aide to Gordon Brown, he was often sucked into the Blair-Brown battles during previous elections. He describes this year’s Labour campaign as the happiest he has ever been involved in. He mocks himself gently as a “happy warrior” – as he reminded himself to be in a leaked crib sheet he wrote before the seven-way TV leaders’ debate.

“There are stresses and pressures in any campaign but I am enjoying the opportunity,” he says. The pressures include very late nights and early starts, sometimes as early as 5.30am. When we met, his first meeting was with a handful of aides at 7.45am in his North London home, while his two sons ran around. Then they held a “prepping” session for a 30-minute BBC TV interview with Evan Davis. Then the interview itself, before Mr Miliband headed to Glasgow, where he addressed the Scottish TUC. After that, he took the train to Preston, where we talked as his battlebus took him to Manchester for an overnight stop. He arrived at 10pm, going straight into another “prep” for his early morning interview on the BBC TV Breakfast programme.

Mr Miliband is getting “six-ish hours” of sleep, a little less than usual, though in an 18-hour day that does not leave room for much else. “Events give me energy, the best time is out on the road,” he says. “I would like to see more of the kids, and they would like to see more of me. They get that this is a slightly unusual time.”

It is also a slightly unusual election. Mr Miliband did not expect to become a sex symbol. He gasped when I showed him a two-page spread in the London Evening Standard, with him mocked up as Poldark –along with his wife Justine and three of his ex-girlfriends in Poldark era attire. An aide snatched the paper and rushed off to read the article. Mr Miliband is unhappy that his former girlfriends have been put in the spotlight, but adds: “The personal stuff about me, I have gone beyond the point of caring about it. I don’t read it.”

The best moment of his campaign? He was pleased with his assured performance at last week’s manifesto launch. He clearly enjoyed the moment when his battlebus was gate-crashed by a hen party in Chester –when he was jokingly described as the stripper. But his serious answer is that his best moment was a man coming up to him at Glasgow Station on Monday to say the NHS “is our right.”

His worst moment? Eventually, he replies “the dog lady” on the Wirral who asked him to hold her dog. He politely refused. “We decided that holding the dog was a piece of spontaneity too far.”

If the opinion polls remain neck and neck, the electoral map dictates that Labour will have more seats than the Tories. So Mr Miliband is quietly confident. “It is an incredibly close election,” he says, knowing that a draw could mean a win for Labour, “but our feet are firmly, firmly on the ground.”

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