Labour party

The dissection of Labour’s election defeat continues with a very thorough series of pieces in today’s Times by Rachel Sylvester and Michael Savage. Describing Ed Miliband’s tenure as leader as a ‘five-year suicide note’, the articles look at the countless errors of judgment and mistakes made by both Ed Miliband and those around him over the last five years. Here are five interesting things we’ve found out. 1.

David Miliband just can’t leave his brother’s election defeat alone. After several brutally honest post-election interviews, Miliband Sr. popped up again on CNN last night to offer his harshest analysis yet on his brother’s leadership. Under Ed, David said, Labour actually went backwards: ‘What I think is important for all the candidates [to replace Ed Miliband] is to reflect on the very clear lessons of two devastating electoral defeats for the Labour party in the last five years, which have come for a very clear reason. ‘And the reason is that the public have concluded that instead of building on the strengths and remedying the weaknesses of the Blair years, the party has turned the page backwards rather than turning the page forwards.

Earlier this month Patrick Wintour wrote an in-depth profile of Ed Miliband's failed election campaign for the Guardian. In it, he went through the different things which had gone wrong for the Labour Party in the lead up to the election. He began the piece by focussing on Miliband's speech in September at the Labour Conference where he forgot to mention the deficit - a mistake that cost him later in the campaign. Wintour says that according to a Labour source, a late change to his speech to include Isis meant he was 'off his game': 'He was not quite sure in his head where he was, so when he got to the bit where the deficit should have been, he just started a different section.

Tristram Hunt’s education policy was assumed to be a victim of Ed Milband’s straitjacket. But now, the shadow education is free to speak his mind about where Labour went wrong and his actual thoughts on education policy. On the Today programme this morning, Hunt explained why he was sticking the boot into Miliband for the second time in 24 hours: ‘It’s right that every shadow cabinet member reflects on their area of policy. We suffered a crushing defeat and we need to know what went right and what went wrong.

Everyone in Labour is having their say about where the party went wrong in the run-up to the election. But what if it’s still making the same mistakes as it tries to elect a new leader? At a seminar on Friday on Labour’s defeat, Ed Miliband’s policy chief Jon Cruddas fretted that the way the party was running its leadership contest was giving the Tories the same advantage they were handed by the same sort of contest in 2010 He said: ‘Last time round we embarked on… a leadership election which worked through the summer and allowed our opponents to redefine the terms of debate that were locked in for the next five years, and we’re repeating exactly that now.

The fear and loathing within Labour continues with the admission from Harriet Harman that its voters were relieved it didn’t win the election. The party’s interim leader is interviewed in the Independent this morning, claiming that voters were ‘not massively enthusiastic’ about voting Conservative but ‘settled for the devil they knew’: ‘Sometimes after an election, you get a sense that people think ‘Oh my God, that is terrible, what a disaster.’ A lot of people felt that because we got nearly 40,000 new party members who were very disappointed. But there is an even greater number of people, even though they were not enthusiastic about David Cameron or the Tories, who feel relieved that we are not in government.

Ed Miliband's general election campaign was clearly dysfunctional, but now we have an insight into just how bad it was. The Guardian's political editor Patrick Wintour has produced a fantastic long read on the undoing of Miliband, revealing the fear and loathing inside his operation. The piece is such a fascinating read it's worth buying a copy of the paper for. If you aren't able to make it to a newsagent, here's a summary of the five most interesting things we've learnt from it. 1. The Edstone went through ten approval meetings The Edstone (pictured above) will be Miliband's legacy. If he is remembered for nothing else, it will be for engraving his pledges onto a 8ft 6in piece of limestone.

The first PMQs after an election victory is a moment to savour for a Prime Minister. He knows that the result gives him a trump card he can play again and again. So, it was unsurprising that Harriet Harman made little progress against Cameron. He treated it as a gentle net session, meeting each question with a slightly more aggressive and expansive answer. He did, though, seem slightly discombobulated by Ed Balls’ absence. Early on he made a joke about Balls’ defeat and then looked over to where Balls used to sit to drive the point home, but Balls – of course — wasn’t there.

If you’re a Labour leadership contender, or keen for other reasons to look in touch with people - or perhaps you really do disagree with MPs getting a 10 per cent pay rise, then the fashionable thing to say is that you’ll be turning down the pay rise. This morning Andy Burnham has said he will refuse the extra £7,000 that Ipsa plans to pay MPs per year, tweeting that he ‘will turn down at source or give to local groups’. Stella Creasy, campaigning to be elected Labour’s deputy leader, has said similar. https://twitter.com/andyburnhammp/status/606007088339415040 Both MPs will have to donate to local groups because Ipsa says there is no way of refusing a pay rise.