article: I went to the North West of England to talk to Labour campaigners about the shock of the defeat and their view on the way forward. First stop, Bury in Greater Manchester. The former mill town is known for its "world famous" market which attracts bus and coach tours from all over the North West - and drew in a fair few politicians for photo shoots during the general election campaign. You can get good honest northern grub there - pies, black puddings and Lancashire cheese (pictured below) - and while you might think this classic industrial town would be a Labour stronghold, in fact it's been a battleground between Labour and the Conservatives for decades. Not winning the parliamentary seat of Bury North, which contains the town centre, was a huge disappointment for Labour on 8 May. The defeated Labour candidate, James Frith, a small business owner, said: "It was devastating, in every sense, from a national point of view but also because of the sheer toil that we put in. "We lost by 378 votes. We actually bucked the national trend in Bury North but at the count it just wasn't the night to win it." Overall in the north west of England, Labour increased its share of the vote by just over 5% but the loss of a key marginal, Bolton West, and the failure to win target seats such as Bury North and Morecambe and Lunesdale were local signs of a wider story. "The more you start to analyse the results, the bleaker it looks for Labour," says Prof Andrew Russell, head of politics at the University of Manchester. "It's still useful to look at the general election result not really as a national contest but as a series of geographies of the vote. There were lots of battles where you thought the ground war would matter. "What is remarkable is that although there were some successes for Labour in some of those ground battles, the overwhelming story is of unexpectedly bad results." So what went wrong? For one thing, says Prof Russell, the Conservatives' campaign strategy was more sophisticated, and not just in the marginals of the north west of England. "An electoral strategy that picks off the particular voters that might swing the vote in a particular context was the secret of the ground war and the Conservatives were much better at targeting voters with complex stories. "So they would be appealing to Lib Dem waverers in some seats, saying if you vote Lib Dem that might let in Labour and the SNP. In other seats, they were happy for UKIP to take votes off Labour and come up on the blind side. It was a very complex picture." The former MP Julie Hilling is still recovering from the shock of losing her seat of Bolton West to the Conservatives by 800 votes. I caught up with her in Westminster when she returned to pack up her office and her flat. She said two groups of her former constituents had deserted Labour on election day. "We
summary: Labour is still reeling from its general election disaster, which reduced the party to its lowest number of MPs since 1987, left members battered and bruised and started the search for a new leader.