SIR – As Ed Miliband reflects on Labour’s election disaster, the false prophets gather to tell him what he should have done, led by the eel-like political hanger-on, Peter Mandelson, again proving hindsight is a powerful thing.

He speaks of the Labour party lurching too far to the left of politics, bleating that the blueprint Ed should have chosen was to ape Blair’s New Labour administration.

Surely New Labour was the Conservative Party by another name, brought to its knees by a disastrous war (unlike Thatcher’s, which made her re-electable).

At that time a vote for either party was interchangeable. For Mandelson to state that the Miliband offer ignored the aspirational members of the middle ground, hardworking small businessmen is untrue.

What he chooses to omit is that, unlike the Tories, it did include provision for those members of society who are forgotten about in the political scrum.

They work equally hard on low incomes and zero-hour contracts, but cannot make ends meet; those for whom the unregulated capitalist system does no favours; the ones who, like some, cannot slither back to the House of Lords or into another highly paid non-job. The voters in Bradford, to their credit, recognised this.

A Waterhouse, Barmby Road, Bradford