When all the excuses are said and done, the sad fact is that middle England fell out of love with Labour.

The good results were with heartland voters: those who retained traditional loyalties and those who were frightened enough of the Tories to stick with us.

But heartland votes are never enough to give Labour victory, which was always the point of New Labour’s pact with middle England. A grubby compromise for some, betrayal of our roots for others. But a deal, personified in Tony Blair, that withstood a decade of vicissitudes and three general elections to enable us to transform Britain into a modern and more egalitarian society. And whatever the recriminations, our achievements were huge.

But now that those votes have been scooped up by the centre-right coalition, we need to work out a political agenda that will build a new relationship with middle England.

Simply waiting for the Lib-Con coalition to fall apart and assume that the voters will revert to us with relief is a dangerous strategy. The assumption that an anti-cuts opposition will endear us to our lost voters is also false. We protested all through the 80s and most of the 90s about Tory cuts to little electoral effect apart from local government.

Middle England’s disengagement is more profound than that. Some of the reasoning I heard during the campaign was logic-defying. The CWU member who said he was voting Tory because he was angry about what Labour had done to Royal Mail. His wife who was cross with us because she only got £30 a month in tax credits, was even more cross about immigration, but was voting Lib Dem despite their amnesty for illegal immigrants. ‘Every party’s got good and bad bits.’

But some of it was the result of the accretions of layers of opposition, and frustrations over ignored warnings. Groups of voters alienated on individual issues who built up into a critical mass with a narrative of Labour isn’t listening.

Labour, the party of emancipation, became authoritarian. Tough on crime became brutal towards the not-so-criminal, as in the scandal of the detention of children at Yarls Wood. The party of redistribution allowed too much money to disappear into bureaucratic delivery vehicles and never reach the disadvantaged.

Middle England saw its tax breaks disappear, while tax credits shifted large amounts of money to people who some saw as the undeserving poor. The consensus required to achieve our dreams of a radical transformation of society fractured.

Most of all, people wanted something different. Both the Lib Dems and Conservatives depleted rainforests to pump out centrally produced direct mailings to target voters in the key marginals presenting their leaders as the change everyone wanted. We didn’t, and couldn’t.

So the election of our new leader will be the first step in getting us heard. The second will be a new politics.

It will need to be more direct. People don’t want to wait years for the benefits of a Labour government to trickle down through layers of unreconstructed bureaucracy.

It will need to build a new legitimacy for public services. Labour’s investment has transformed those services. But there is a widespread perception that the investment has not always delivered value for money. The forthcoming cuts will be accompanied by a barrage of lurid propaganda about waste.

It will need to tackle the issue of choice. ‘Tell me why I pay so much in taxes and I still can’t get my daughter into the school I want,’ was the question from one of my lost voters.

It will need to find a way forward on tax. The coalition government is changing the shape of taxation: reducing the role of employment-based taxes, expected to increase tax on consumption. It’s likely to end up being more regressive. But to regain the initiative on fairness we will have to provide transparency and re-establish the community of interest that exists around the tax and benefit system.

And we will need to do it quickly. We won’t have the luxury of a 1980s-style long march back to electorability. Things move faster now. We saw in this election campaign how a mere televised debate transformed the political leverage, if not the electoral strength, of the Liberal Democrats.

Our new leader will have the lifetime of one parliament – however long that may be – to get us back into contention. And to establish that the centre left – Labour – with or without the greens and nationalists – is the progressive force in British politics.