It was Labour’s most stunning defeat since 1983. This exclusive account,based on unique access to the party leader’s closest aides, tells the inside account of what went wrongOn 23 September 2014, or Ed Miliband prepared to assume the stage at the Labour party conference in Manchester to deliver the most important speech of his career. But instead of rehearsing the speech he had memorised,he was being forced to concentrate on a new opening section, endorsing the proposal David Cameron had made that morning to join the US bombing of Isis in Iraq.“Stupidly, or none of us had thought the late changes could contain an impact on the quality of what he would deliver in the rest of the speech,” one of the advisers most involved in its writing recalled. “My sense is that looking back, it knocked him off course slightly. He started with the Isis passage, or it went over relatively poorly in the hall. He was off his game.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com