SO, Jim Murphy has gone. Sort of. On Saturday, the man chosen Campaigner of the Year for 2014 by the Spectator magazine announced he was stepping down after just a few months in charge of Scottish Labour.

The manner of Murphy’s departure spoke volumes about his troubled tenure.

After a week fielding calls for his resignation, Murphy survived a vote of no confidence at the party’s Scottish executive committee (SEC) by the narrowest of margins. He then promptly told a room full of journalists – not his colleagues – that he was going after all. But not until the next month’s SEC meeting, where he will table a “radical” set of internal reforms.

Sunday’s papers were filled with decidedly hagiographical portraits of Murphy. He had done the honourable thing, fallen on his own sword. He had been handed a poisoned chalice by Johann Lamont. He could hardly have been solely blamed for losing 39 of Scottish Labour’s 40 seats.

The reality, of course, is that Murphy played a bad hand woefully.

From the bevvy at football to the doom-laden “referendum the sequel” warnings, Scottish Labour’s scattergun election campaign was, as one Labour activist put it recently, “a gimmick-ridden disaster”. And it was a calamity fronted at all turns by a beaming Jim Murphy.

But what has been lost in the latest bout of revisionism is that Murphy and Scottish Labour could tie his successor’s hands before he or she has even been elected.

Next month, Murphy will present a “strategic overview” of the challenges facing Scottish Labour and a plan for reshaping the party. The man who led Scottish Labour to a defeat so bad it made the Battle of Stamford Bridge look like a light dust-up has chosen himself as the man to re-model the party.

Labour, Murphy wrote in a blog post in the wake of Saturday’s denouement, needs “a clear understanding of Scottish voters’ concerns and aspirations”.

Does losing 97.5 per cent of your seats – including one’s own – not suggest less than full grasp of what’s animating Scottish voters?

The headlines since Saturday have been dominated by swipes at the “destructive behaviour” of Len McCluskey at Unite. Few inside Scottish Labour doubt that the time has come for the party to introduce one man, one vote in leadership elections, but why should a political zombie – which is what Murphy is now – dictate terms to the living?

Murphy says that the status quo is the only thing “off the table” – the irony is that few people have worked harder to resist change in Scottish Labour’s relationship with the UK party than Murphy. That Labour in Scotland needed to be much more than a mere “branch office” has been obvious since defeat at Holyrood in 2007, but the Westminster cohort of which Murphy was a senior member were implacable in the face of demands for a radical loosening of the ties that bind.

Jim Murphy failed to understand how Scotland has changed since devolution. If he did, he would not have spent months appealing to a caricatured beer-swilling, football fan-cum-voter that exists more in pre-1997 imagination than in 2015 reality.

What Scottish Labour needs now is well-worked proposals. There is no shortage of problems in need of solutions. Labour needs to shift focus from the west of Scotland to where power really lies: Holyrood. This means dismantling its Glasgow headquarters and shifting operations to Edinburgh.

Labour needs to reopen its Holyrood 2016 lists. Many of the current crop of list MSPs are at best placeholders, at worst weak and ineffectual. With the party set to lose what remains of its constituency seats, giving preference to sitting list MSPs would leave Labour dangerous light in the Scottish Parliament. There is substance among some of the defeated MPs – Gregg McClymont, Katy Clark, Douglas Alexander, Tom Greatrex – the party could badly use next year.

Labour needs to choose the right leader and give that person time. Most activists support Kezia Dugdale. She is certainly a far more emollient character than Murphy. Her online peroration yesterday began by putting clear blue water with her former boss – “Jim Murphy and I didn’t stand on a ticket or any joint slate” – and ended with a gloriously barbed farewell, imagining a future Scotland where “the sun will be shining and someone somewhere will be opening a can of Irn-Bru”.

Personality clashes have, however, deflected from what Scottish Labour needs most of all: policies. Since 2007, the party has struggled to come up with distinctive policy proposals. Attacking the SNP’s record is all well and good, but solutions and alternatives are needed too. (The council tax would be a good place to start.)

But with less money than ever in the wake of the General Election annihilation, Scottish Labour’s policy-making capacity is likely to be even weaker in the years ahead.

This will be Jim Murphy’s legacy. And “radical” internal reforms will not change that.