Earlier this month Patrick Wintour wrote an in-depth profile of Ed Miliband’s failed election campaign for the Guardian. In it, he went through the different things which had gone wrong for the Labour Party in the lead up to the election.
He began the piece by focussing on Miliband’s speech in September at the Labour Conference where he forgot to mention the deficit – a mistake that cost him later in the campaign. Wintour says that according to a Labour source, a late change to his speech to include Isis meant he was ‘off his game’:
‘He was not quite sure in his head where he was, so when he got to the bit where the deficit should have been, he just started a different section. I remember immediately thinking ‘sh-t’, but I thought perhaps he had shuffled it around because I had seen him do that before.’
However Mr S understands that a bout of illness may have been what, in part, caused Miliband’s lacklustre performance. A
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