Labour inquest: party grandees open up on what went wrong

As Labour's five leadership candidates take part in hustings today, the party's grandees have been voicing their thoughts on what caused their defeat at the polls last month.

Interim leader Harriet Harman has led the way with an eye-catching claim that even Labour supporters were privately relieved that the party did not win power. She says the party gave the "wrong message" during the campaign, leading many voters to feel Labour "doesn't talk about" them.

Labour, she argues in The Independent, was seen as supporting "people on benefits" but not those who "work hard". She concluded: "It doesn't matter how many leaflets you deliver if the message is not right."

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According to Harman, respected pollster Deborah Mattinson has uncovered a feeling of relief among Labour voters that the party failed to get into power. One supporter in Ealing Central and Acton confessed to being "a little bit disappointed and a little bit relieved".

Writing in The Guardian, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt says the party failed on his specialist area of education "because we signally failed to use the potency of education policy – its focus on the future, its capacity to craft a different society, its centrality to wealth creation and work – to offer a compelling enough vision of a Labour Britain".

He said Labour "muddled our priorities" by focusing on the tuition fees cut, rather than primary education. "If our main goal is eradicating educational inequality, then our investment priority must always be the early years," he wrote, adding that Ed Miliband "allowed himself to be perceived as uninterested in schools policy".

As the inquest widens, Lord Mandelson said that the party suffered at the polls because it failed to have a strategy for decentralising power from London to northern England. The former business secretary told the BBC: "The Labour party had positions or it had postures, or put it a different way, if I was going to be really cruel – it had language."

Alastair Campbell, who was Mandelson's fellow spin doctor during the party's golden era, warned that there could be worse to come for Labour. Declaring that the party is in "big trouble" after last month's result, Tony Blair's former director of communications said that members need to understand that "this may not be the bottom".

With so many leading figures joining the merciless inquest, Miliband could be forgiven for feeling a little sore. The Spectator says the former leader has been knifed in the front by Harman and Hunt.

There is no respite for the former leader in The Guardian's letters page, where a correspondent writes: "What went wrong can be more easily summed up in two words: Ed Miliband."