Miliband's move to the left lost Labour the election

Ed Miliband believed he could make history by breaking the consensus that has dominated British politics for 25 years: that Labour could only win elections with a pro-business, centre ground message.

Instead the 45-year-old north London intellectual's attempt to shift the party back towards its leftwing roots ended in a resignation speech before party activists on Friday morning after Labour's worst general election result since 1987.

"I take absolute and total responsibility for our defeat at this election," a sombre, dark-suited Mr Miliband told supporters at a hall in Westminster. "I am truly sorry I did not succeed."

For five years he defied relentless critiques from Blairite colleagues, business and the media for his awkward persona and his unshakeable conviction that Britain's political centre ground had shifted to the left following the global financial crisis.

On the brink of the election, with the polls neck-and-neck, he believed that he could defeat the Tories and - from inside Downing Street - fulfil his dream of narrowing inequality in Britain.

Those dreams crashed to earth at 10pm on Thursday night when the BBC exit poll showed Labour far behind the Tories. As the results came in, they showed an even worse night for the party than the poll predicted.

Staffers at Labour's headquarters in Brewers Green, Victoria, were tearful on Friday morning as Mr Miliband dispatched himself to the backbenches.

Born to Jewish parents who fled the Holocaust to settle in London, Mr Miliband served as a political apprentice under several New Labour administrations, working first as an adviser to Gordon Brown, the former chancellor, and then as a minister, including energy secretary in Mr Brown's cabinet.

But he turned his back on many of New Labour's tenets, seeking to prove that an openly socialist party could win the backing of the British electorate for the first time since the 1970s.

When he ran for the leadership in 2010 he was the dark horse candidate, seen initially as an outsider compared to other candidates such as Ed Balls and David Miliband, his elder brother and former foreign secretary.

When victory came in the autumn of that year - with the help of the trade unions - it shattered the relationship between the two brothers, which has still not recovered.

The younger Miliband believed he should stand because he was best placed to offer an alternative to the discredited New Labour model.

By rejecting much of his own party's legacy - including participation in the Iraq war and the part-privatisation of the National Health Service - he hoped to revitalise his own party while winning support from disillusioned leftwing former Liberal Democrats.

With a nasal speaking voice and awkward features - he was sometimes compared to the animated Plasticine character Wallace - he struggled to win over a sceptical public about his leadership qualities.

His performances on television were often criticised, leading many to question whether the Labour party had picked "the wrong brother" in its leadership election in 2010.

In his final remarks as party leader, Mr Miliband referred to the doubts about his image and the attempts by supporters to counter them with a Twitter campaign, joking that the campaign had seen "the most unlikely cult of the 21st century - Milifandom".

The Miliband leadership was marked by a steady downward trend in polls about his personal popularity, with the exception of a few temporary spikes. Many of those moments came when he deliberately took on what he termed "vested interests" such as bankers, the media or energy companies.

Mr Miliband also chose to thwart David Cameron's attempts to gain political support for an intervention in Syria alongside Barack Obama, the US president.

His other big gamble was in late 2013 to promise a freeze in energy prices.

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Mr Miliband's party also promised to put up taxes on the wealthy, prompting comparisons with President Francois Hollande in France and the nickname opponents gave him: Red Ed.

His election campaign centred on "saving" the NHS and solving the cost of living crisis - whereby households were not feeling the economic recovery in their back pockets.

By the spring of 2015 his public reputation had improved slightly after outperforming expectations in the pre-election television debates. Even then, however, poll after poll found a public that believed David Cameron was the more convincing leader.

Ironically, in Scotland Mr Miliband's Labour party was criticised for not being leftwing enough and for having teamed up with the Conservatives to fight Scottish independence in last year's referendum. The term "Red Tories" was often used by the SNP to attack Scottish Labour.

In the end, it was, the loss of all but one of Labour's caucus of 41 MPs in Scotland and its inability to win marginal seats in the Midlands and northern England from the Conservatives that proved terminal.

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