Ed Miliband realised the moment he stepped off the stage at the 2014 Labour party conference that he had forgotten to mention the deficit and that it would prove a gift to his enemies. He was so distraught that he shut himself in his hotel room where his wife Justine and close advisers tried to persuade him it wasn't that serious.
"We tried to cheer him up,"a former speechwriter recalls, "but he was too upset. He did not come to the celebratory party, he just did not want to come out of his room."
The revelation comes in an extended article by Patrick Wintour, political editor of The Guardian, based on interviews with Labour insiders, titled 'The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election'.
"It is a story of decisions deferred, of a senior team divided, and of a losing struggle to make the Labour leader electable," writes Wintour. "At its heart are the twin forces that would prove to be the party's undoing: the profound doubts about Labour's instincts on the economy and the surge of nationalism in Labour's onetime Scottish heartlands."
Here are five things Miliband's aides told Wintour anonymously – and why