Labour’s election strategy utterly failed, and it has to admit as much | Martin Kettle

Many on the left were sanguine and self-deceived about this campaign. They must now confront the question of responsibility

When Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour party in 2010, a delighted Neil Kinnock was famously reported as saying, “I’ve got my party back.” As the results of the 2015 election began coming in, it was clear that Kinnock was disastrously right. The man who led Labour to two defeats in 1987 and 1992 now has a party with which he can be comfortably familiar, after notching up another pair of nationwide election losses under Gordon Brown in 2010 and now Miliband in 2015.

It has always been clear that Miliband has been following a targeted electoral strategy. The generous view is that he believes that, after the financial crisis, there is a winning coalition to be built from core Labour voters, disillusioned Liberal Democrats and middle-class sympathisers with the poor. But last night it became clear that this strategy has quite simply failed.

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