Ed’s campaign was fine. The problem is his party

Patrick Wintour is one of the best political editors around. For the Guardian he’s been for decades a cool and well-sourced voice: even-handed, informed, interesting but in the best sense dry. So when I heard he’d written the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes account yet of Labour’s failed general election campaign I hurried to read it.

I was not disappointed. ‘The undoing of Ed Miliband, and how Labour lost the election’ is an insider account of a chapter of accidents, starting with Mr Miliband’s memory lapse about the deficit during Labour’s last party conference. Apparently he shut himself in his hotel room afterwards and wouldn’t come out. The story takes us through to the final days of the campaign (the Mail on Sunday’s Simon Walters suggesting this week that Miliband didn’t even know about the ‘Ed Stone’ until the day before he unveiled it.)

Well, we now know how that campaign ended. But here is my problem with even the best of the ‘where it all went wrong’ accounts. Gripped by Wintour’s narrative and never for a second doubting the veracity of the tales which marked Labour’s stumble towards disaster — tales ‘of decisions deferred, of a senior team divided, and of a losing struggle to make the Labour leader electable’ — I was troubled by one thought. It’s the trouble with history as explanation; with the ‘it was always inevitable’ school of analysis.

What if the Conservatives had lost? Could we not then have written (and were we not indeed ready to write) an equally gripping account of all the Tory mistakes, stumbles and divisions along the way to that defeat? Their ‘negative’ campaign? Their ‘insulting’ messaging? Admit it, fellow journalists, such an analysis would have been easy to write.