Before Labour can move on, the Left needs to admit that it was wrong

Ed Miliband was the wrong choice. The Left needs to come clean about it

Would Ed's stone be more appropriate as a headstone for the Labour Party?
How much would you bid for this piece of political history? Credit: Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA

On election night I took my wife out to dinner. And it was crap. Or rather, I was crap.

All I could think about was the result. I just sat their mouthing monosyllabic platitudes. Then finally I looked at her and said, “I’ll open a bookshop”. And she looked back at me in that way you do when someone close to you randomly says “I’ll open a book shop”. And I said “If Labour win. I won’t be able to write any more. So I’d like to open a bookshop”. And then we ordered desert.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve bumped into a lot of people who were having similar conversations that evening. Just yesterday a friend of mine explained how he’d told his girlfriend “I’ve spent my whole life working in politics. And if Ed Miliband wins I won’t understand it any more”. A member of the shadow cabinet I was chatting to over the weekend said: “I’m actually relieved we lost. I was starting to think 'maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s me'. Perhaps they’ve been right all along, and I just don’t get this stuff now."

Since that night I’ve found myself being asked, and answering, the same question. “What did you think when you saw that exit poll? You must have been ecstatic”. To which I have been replying, “Oh well, you know. Conflicted emotions really. Obviously pleased I don’t have to put up with lots of people shouting 'see, we told you Hodges'. But I voted Labour and it’s a disappointing result.”

But in truth what I’ve actually been feeling is a sense of relief. Relief that the political world works in the same way it always did. Or a least the way I thought it did. Which means I can keep on writing about it. Because I still understand it. For now, all the pulleys still pull the right things. And all the levers still lever the right things.

And that’s also why I understand – genuinely, I’m not being facetious here – that it’s hard for people on the other side of the fence. The people who have spent the past five years looking at the political world in a different way.

This morning I woke up to hear that the Guardian had published an editorial calling for Alan Johnson to be installed as Labour leader. Chastising members of the parliamentary Labour Party for endorsing favoured candidates relatively early in the campaign, the paper complains: “They haven’t even heard a single speech by any of the candidates. But a lot of them have decided who they are nominating. This is more than absurd”. It then goes on to claim Johnson would “be perfect” for the role of “interim leader”. Even though his colleagues haven’t heard a single speech from him either, because he isn’t even standing.

But it wasn’t this inconsistency that made me do a double take. It was the fact that this was the same Guardian that two weeks ago was telling us that the answer to all our problems was Ed Miliband. “He may not have stardust or TV-ready charisma, but those are qualities that can be overvalued. He has resilience and, above all, a strong sense of what is just.”

Now, I know a bit about Ed Miliband, and I know a bit about Alan Johnson. And they are as politically alike as Winston Churchill and Zsa Zsa Gabor. So was the Guardian wrong when it told us a fortnight ago Ed was the nation’s saviour. Or are they wrong now they’re telling us Alan is?

Yes, yes. If the facts change, and all that. But that’s the point. The facts haven’t changed. They’re the same facts they always were. They’re just being wrapped up in a new, equally inaccurate, analysis.

There’s been a lot written about why Labour lost. The problem is, the reasons being given now are remarkably similar to the reasons we were being given back then for why Labour was going to win.

A week before polling day Steve Richards explained how people were wrong to claim that Ed Miliband had grown during the campaign. In fact, his strengths had always been there. “The recognition that there might be more to the Labour leader shows how the Conservatives and their friends in the media chose only to see of him what they wanted to see. They underestimated him when they had no excuse to do so”. 4 days after polling day Steve’s assessment was “The capacity to project, to engage with voters in a way that appears to be genuine, is not an added extra but an essential demand of leadership”.

Back in June Seamus Milne described how Ed Miliband was terrifying the British establishment and its vested interests. “While he's derided as weak, Miliband has started to challenge those interests in a way no leading British politician has for a generation”, he cooed. A week after the election this once in a generation radicalism had suddenly been downgraded to a “modest departure from the New Labour script”. In June, criticism of Miliband was solely being driven by a fear “with Labour's parliamentary boundary advantage and a little help from Ukip, he might actually win”. After Labour lost Seamus suddenly felt compelled to remind his readers, “Miliband’s personal ratings were never within spitting distance of Cameron’s”.

Like I say, I understand. I really do. There for the grace of God goes the man who once confidently proclaimed: “David Miliband has won” the 2010 Labour party leadership election.

But before these doughty polemicists of the Left begin to once again call the odds - to tell us how Labour lost because it was insufficiently radical, or because Ed Miliband was still in hock to the Blairites, or because he was unable to eat a bacon sandwich and sing the Red Flag at the same time - before all of that, could we have possibly have some sort of acknowledgement they were – you know – wrong?

About everything. The backlash against austerity. The populism of the New Politics. The imminent overthrow of the old order.

Because if I’m honest, it’s starting to grate a little. Having to sit here watching people who spent the last five years lecturing us all in their smug, pretentious, self-righteous way about how we didn’t get it. That the country was changing. And politics was changing. And the world was changing. And that the revolution was just a late night dash to Shoreditch away.

This morning Polly Toynbee has again borne majestic, agonised witness to the inhumanity of her government. “We shall see now, too late, exactly where the axe is falling on all the unprotected departments. The big question is why? Politically, the promise of a rapid deficit abolition, returning to surplus by April 2018, was a sharp challenge to Labour: beat that! Labour wouldn’t and didn’t because it’s brutal, needless and economically dangerous. Now that Osborne has won, he doesn’t need to do it.”

You want to know why, Polly? Because he can. Because you, and people like you, spent the past five years smoothing his path. You swooped like avenging furies on anyone who dared to suggest the Labour Party was losing its way. You squealed like teenage groupies at every vacuous new utterance that passed Ed Miliband’s lips. And you got it wrong. Hopelessly wrong. Utterly wrong. Completely wrong.

So please, before we all move on, before we start to dig new trenches, before we erect fresh barricades, could we just hear three words?

We. Were. Wrong.