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.