text: "sbwhoeopSaturday September 25 2010 11:08 PMH: the revenge of old Labour. Sid0aptember 26 2010John Rentoul: The party voted for DavidMiliband but got the Panda insteadNew Labour leader won't stand a chance against DavidCameronThe result is the worst possible for the Labour Party. A decisive victory for Ed Miliband would have been one thing. Theparty would have made the wrong decision but it would have done so with its eyes open and with the leader's legitimacyunchallenged.Instead Ed Miliband lost the election in two parts of Labour's electoral college among MPs and among Labour Partymembers but won thanks to a 60-40 margin the other way among trade union members on a very low turnout.If he had won by a clear margin I would have said that Labour had chosen the Panda as its leader. He is soft cuddly andpanders to every oppositional instinct in the party. There has been no position taken by the Labour government of whichhe was a member that he was not prepared to trash if he thought Labour members would like it. Tuition fees Iraq thethird runway for Heathrow: you name it he disowned it. Even in the case of the third runway a policy for which he haddirect ministerial responsibility. There has been no part of the manifesto which he wrote that he has not been prepared toditch.But that is not what the party did. Labour Party members chose David Miliband. Labour MPs chose David. The party itselfvoted for what Ed Miliband tried to dismiss as the ""New Labour Establishment"" in other words the supposedly hatedBlairites. The party read the signals from the voters correctly. It knows that although it didn't do as badly as it feared in thegeneral election a lurch to the left was not the answer. Party members and MPs took on board Tony Blair's warning thatLabour lost because Gordon Brown ""moved a millimetre"" to the left of New Labour. They did not fall for the argument thatLabour did better than expected by moving a millimetre to the left and therefore to do better still they needed to move acouple of centimetres further to the left.They did not think that because Labour has pulled level in the opinion polls the next election is in the bag. They knowthat the opposition party often moves ahead of the government in the opinion polls within months of an election. They alsoknow that Labour's poll rating is artificially inflated by the absence from the fray of the Liberal Democrats as a protestparty and they know that this protest vote cannot be relied upon in a general election.The Labour Party and Labour MPs got it right and the election was won by an operation run by the trade union machines.That means that Ed Miliband who would have struggled against David Cameron in the House of Commons in any eventis going to be roasted every week.Every week the Prime Minister is going to point out that the Leader of the Opposition does not have the support of themembers on the benches behind him. Not only that he does not have the support of the members of his party in thecountry. Every week Cameron is going to portray Miliband as the place person of the trade union bosses and thebeneficiary of a boss-politics stitch-up.If Ed Miliband had won the party members but lost among MPs which is what I expected the Conservatives would haveteased him in the Commons but he would have had as much legitimacy as lain Duncan Smith - the choice of the partyactivists against the wishes of his MPs. No wonder Ed was the ""cork-popper"" candidate in Conservative HQ. The waythings have turned out that's not just a phrase; it would be worth lifting the austerity ban on bubbly for. David Cameronlucky general faces an opponent with less of a mandate than IDS.Even if Ed Miliband had won comfortably in all three sections of Labour's electoral college I feel he would have struggledagainst Cameron. This way I fear that he fights with both hands tied behind his back."