As the long night drew on Miliband became a political ghost

Anne McElvoy THE tumbling of big names bought h o me the scale of the s l au g h t e r. Labour’s dogged Douglas Alexander was felled in Paisley by an SNP ingénue barely out of her teens. London’s Ba t t e r s e a , the L abour prize, still stubbornly in Tory hands. Vince Cable, sage of Twickenham, down and out.

As dawn broke Tory ministers purred on the airwaves. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond suggested that a renegotiation deal on the terms of Britain’s EU membership was all but a done deal. Peak misery for Labour and the Lib-Dems came at 3am: the moment the bad prediction becomes the evenworse realit y. While everyone was sending tweets about being “gutted” and “hard-working”, the search for Ed’s successor was mentally under way.

If there was any consolation, it was that t h e L i b e r a l De moc r a t s were haemorrhaging even more profusely. Sitting in the BBC studios with a former Liberal Democrat minister, I asked her who might succeed Nick Clegg. She joked that the number of contenders would be vanishingly small. The sight of Simon Hughes, the veteran Bermondsey MP, tear- glazed like a veteran sur veying t he batt l ef i el d, touched hardened hearts. Against this c a r n a ge , C l e g g l o o ke d guilt y for winning.

A succession of Labour figures told us that life would be very hard for David Cameron, who would face the unicycle challenge of trying to run a minority government.

But he is in power and his main opponent is on the ropes — and Ukip, for all the sound and light, did not kill him off.

There is a convenient narrative that says this is all a backwash of Scottish nationalism and the prospect of a Labour government propped up by the SNP surely spooked voters.

But that is not the whole story. Ed Miliband, despite a plucky campaign, positioned Labour in a place where it could not hope to compensate for Scottish losses with English votes. The glaring lesson from this rout is that a lack of economic credibility damaged him and helped Mr Cameron back to No 10. Pathos is not a path to power. He was off to London “to await the final results”, he said with the tone of Anne Boleyn looking at Tower Green. Long before sunrise, Ed was a political ghost.

You need only to gauge one big factor right to win an election. David Cameron figured that the mood in most parts of England was not as allergic to the remedies of austerit y, nor as Leftish in general outlook, than the Labour high command convinced i t s el f was the c ase. Scotland now looks inc re asingly country.

Not long ago Tony Blair told me that he f o r e s aw an election “i n wh i c h a traditional Left-wing part y fights a traditional Right-wing party — with the traditional result”. Being Mr Blair, he then denied that he had intended to f orec as t a stonking defeat for Mr Miliband. But his instinct was right, voters may carp at Mr Cameron but it turns out they can tolerate him.

Now we all sail on the choppy seas of an EU referendum and a Scotland which has left Labour — and looks like it wants to leave the Union. Only the self-deluded will say that the voters on both sides of the border have not spoken loud and clear.

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The glaring lesson from this rout is that a lack of economic credibility damaged Ed Miliband