One year into his leadership Ed Miliband has shown himself free of the conservatism that hampered many of his predecessors. But he must choose his next steps with care, writes Paul Richards

Since 1945, Labour has had eight leaders of the opposition. Clement Attlee became prime minister after serving as deputy prime minister for five years and led Labour to a landslide in the most unusual of circumstances. Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith both died in the job, before being tested by a general election. Michael Foot led Labour to a crushing defeat. Neil Kinnock picked up the pieces, and was a successful leader of the opposition only if success is redefined as not coming third. A quarter of Labour’s opposition leaders – Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – have taken Labour from opposition to government having won an election. Wilson won four (but with a defeat in 1970), and of course Blair remains Labour’s most electorally successful leader by a country mile, with three huge successive victories, never having been rejected by the voters at the ballot box.

Ed Miliband needs to skate lightly over the careers of his predecessors. Each won or lost (mostly lost) in political circumstances very different from the ones he will face in 2014 and 2015. The Labour party has kept its feet on the ground despite the failures after 2007. There has been no ‘lurch to the left’. Unlike Kinnock, the job is not dealing with extremists. It is much harder than that. It is dealing with people in denial, still uncomprehending of just how unpopular Labour became by 2010. Unlike Wilson or Blair, Miliband will not face a government past its prime, ravaged by longevity. Indeed, David Cameron may go the country with the economy growing, and a slogan of ‘let us finish the job’.

Miliband knows his job is not to emulate his predecessors but to rewrite the script. He was immediately hobbled by the manner of his victory. To win by such a narrow margin, against your own brother, made victory an anchor not a springboard. The question of a role for David Miliband remains open. But Miliband has united the shadow cabinet. He has ignored the old labels and loyalties, and given preference to people of talent. Putting Liam Byrne in charge of the policy review and Peter Hain in charge of the Refounding Labour review showed an ecumenical approach to important aspects of party reform and renewal. By winning the plebiscite in the parliamentary Labour party to end the nonsense of shadow cabinet elections, he has demonstrated both modernising zeal and support on the backbenches. After more than 20 years in and around Labour MPs, ministers and shadow ministers, I have never heard so little grumbling and griping about the leader. A party which thrives on plotting and intrigue seems to have kicked the habit. Miliband’s plans to widen the scope of Labour’s aims and objectives to include community-building is audacious. It marks a shift from pure electoralism. We will see whether the party takes it to its heart.

Foot and Kinnock were unlucky in the events which engulfed Britain during their tenure. Foot had to respond to a war in the Falklands which divided the Labour party, but united the country behind Margaret Thatcher. Foot opted for Churchillian support for the Task Force, but it counted for little. Kinnock was confronted by the miners’ strike. The son of a miner, it tore into his soul to see the miners led so badly by Arthur Scargill, and depicted as an ‘enemy within’ by Thatcher. Miliband has found a voice during the two major political events of the past year. On Hackgate, he has managed to construct a wider narrative around unelected, unaccountable power and plug into a national mood of disquiet. On the question of the riots, Miliband’s call for a commission of inquiry was pitch-perfect. At PMQs he has bested Cameron week after week, by picking up policy specifics, and exposing the prime minister’s lack of attention to detail. He has even allowed glimpses of his happy family life, with a low-key wedding and a reassuringly normal family holiday. After Gordon Brown’s sports jackets and Blair’s yachts, this came as a relief.

In year one, Miliband has secured his base in the party, earned the right to be heard with the public, who are only just getting to know him, and developed into a sound leader of the opposition. The challenge in years two, three and four is to look and sound like an alternative prime minister. This requires action on three fronts.

First, Labour needs an election-winning machine which can galvanise support in the seats where Labour must win: along the south coast, north Kent, commuter towns around the M25, seats in the south-west, the Midlands and the Pennines. In Iain McNicol Labour has a new general secretary who instinctively understands the need to win in places which deliver a Labour government. As a GMB officer covering workers in the south-east, and a Labour party agent in a key seat in west London, McNicol has the right experience. Miliband’s advisers got it wrong in opposing his bid for the job, but Miliband himself can forge a good working relationship between leader and general secretary, like Kinnock and Larry Whitty and Blair and Tom Sawyer before him.

Second, Labour needs a credible economic policy. Alistair Darling’s memoirs lay bare the degree of denial about the deficit at the heart of the last government. This was perhaps more damaging than the now well-documented chaos, mismanagement, violence and character assassination. Labour must now fashion an economic policy which recognises the scale of the challenge. It is hard to remember, but Labour did not win the landslide in 1997 promising to spend more money. Indeed, we won promising to stick to the Tories’ spending limits, and one of our five key pledges, on every poster, mug and pledge card, was not to raise income tax. Labour needs similar fiscal discipline in the coming months and, crucially, a clue as to how it would reallocate scarce resources. It makes campaigning against every cut impossible, but it makes winning power more likely.

Third, Labour needs a credible programme of public service reform. The animating feature of socialism is that it believes in a better future, not in defending the status quo. Promising that things will be more or less the same is not an election-winning tactic. On the NHS, Labour will inherit a system of GP commissioning. How will we reform it? We will inherit a raft of free schools. Are we going to renationalise them? On everything from the energy markets to the prison system, from the House of Lords to rail franchises, Labour needs some policies which demonstrate our overall approach. This can be small-scale, but far-reaching. Scrapping the assisted places scheme was the centrepiece of Labour’s 1997 campaign. It seems puny and inconsequential today, compared to Labour’s vast programme of school building, curriculum reform, teaching assistants and sure start centres. In each area of people’s lives, Labour must offer some way to make things a little better.

Railing against the cuts and resisting every reform makes Labour look reactionary and conservative. Miliband is neither, and the party’s programme, and general tone and approach, needs to reflect that. One lesson from our history is that parties that reek of yesterday cannot seize the future. If Miliband wants to join the small, select group of Labour leaders who have won elections he must appear more of a reformer than Cameron, more of a radical than Clegg.

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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival and a contributor to The Purple Book

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Photo: Louisa Thomson