Michael Dugher: Labour lost because we had too many pointy-heads and too few street fighters.

Michael Dugher was Ed Miliband’s vice-chair of the Labour party but he’s not holding back on the criticism of how last month’s election campaign was run.

He told the New Statesman: “I know that, personally. If you’d have asked me aged ten what I wanted . . . I would have said I would’ve liked my parents to be able to afford a car; I would’ve liked us to go on a foreign holiday.

“We lived in a warm, loving house, but it was quite a small house for six people, and I might have liked my own bedroom. That’s working-class aspiration.”

He added: “I’ve always thought that politics is 90 per cent emotion. All parties need a combination of people with different talents and reaches. Ed was very intellectual, he had a brilliant brain; he felt that ideas were the most important thing in politics.

“And he’s right. But I sometimes felt that he surrounded himself with too many people who were socially just like him: all living within a stone’s throw of each other in north London, all had been to the same university, and all kind of intellectual ­academics . . .”