Lord Mandelson and his protégé Chuka Umunna ended up sitting next to one another on the Marr sofa at the end of the programme. Both had spent their interviews setting out what Labour had been doing wrong for the past five years, though Mandelson was markedly more savage than Umunna. The Labour peeer was particularly keen to make the point that New Labour had been too quickly discarded in favour of an ‘experiment’. He said that ‘the awful, shocking thing about this election is Labour could have won it’, adding:
‘The reason we lost it and lost it so badly is in 2010 we discarded New Labour, rather than revitalising it and re-energising it and making it relevant for the new times, the new policy challenges that we faced. That was a terrible mistake.’
Umunna was as keen to talk about his visits to marginal seats and the importance of protecting workers as he was about aspiration. Tristram Hunt has been on Murnaghan saying Labour should also be the party for people who shop at John Lewis. So far, so Blairite. But it won’t just be the Blairites who want to have a go at being leader: it just seems that this faction is keen to get out with their arguments about why the party lost first. They are clearly – in a wonderfully Blairite way – hoping that he who goes first can at least shape the narrative so that those who come later arguing that Labour wasn’t left-wing enough find it more of a challenge to do so.
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