If knocking on doors and shoving pamphlets through letterboxes were efficient ways to change minds, Britain would have a lot more Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Labour government. Measured in pavements pounded, Ed Miliband’s election campaign was a success. A target of four million doorstep conversations was met and exceeded. Every weekend, activists fanned out across target seats, armed with clipboards and flyers, bringing the good news.

But the news was awful. Of Labour’s many election disappointments, perhaps the sharpest is the failure of traditional canvassing to yield votes. Constituencies where the opposition challenger’s “contact rate” vastly outstripped that of the Tory incumbent saw Conservative majorities increase. One problem was selling a product not enough people wanted to buy. But the method was also flawed. Many of the interactions were not “conversations” in a meaningful sense of the word: did you vote Labour last time? Will you be voting Labour again? No? Wrong answer. Off to the next door.

Often the first thing new recruits get from party HQ is an email begging for time and money

On the campaigning trail I saw a few moments of charismatic evangelism and a lot of robotic data collection. And much of the canvassing data was as duff as the opinion polls turned out to be. There was a misplaced confidence drawn from the experience of 2010 when a Stakhanovite get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation saved scores of seats that David Cameron should have bagged, given the national swing to the Tories. Labour campaign strategists knew Miliband was a turn-off for many voters and that the manifesto wasn’t setting pulses racing, but they kidded themselves that organisation could compensate for uninspiring leadership.

A danger now is oversteering the other way: taking activist muscle for granted and pinning hopes for recovery on new policy and a more telegenic chief. The leadership race is dominated by arguments about repositioning on old axes of left and right; southern middle-class aspiration and northern working-class solidarity; Blairism and anything-but-Blairism. There is some discussion of what Labour should be saying about Britain in the 21st century, which is half of the right question. The other half, just as hard, is grasping what a modern political party should look like.

Of the decisions Cameron has taken since his re-election, the one that should frighten Labour the most is the appointment of Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, to work on a review of Tory structures. Halfon’s ambition is to rebrand the Tories as the modern “workers’ party”. He envisages a kind of trade union for self-starters – a political lubricant on the wheels of social mobility – while the established big unions spend their energies opposing public sector cuts, mourning the decline of traditional manufacturing jobs and denouncing Labour politicians who dare to admit that the future of work may be elsewhere.

The left’s default response to Conservative claims to be pro-worker is contempt. It is easy to mock the idea of Cameron standing up for the toiling masses while the pockets of his Old Etonian tailcoat bulge with hedge-funded millions. But traditional class-based, anti-Tory resentment is a dwindling force in British politics, at least insofar as it leads automatically to support for Labour. The connection survives in parts of northern England and among some older voters. It didn’t dent Halfon’s local status as a champion of striving Essex men and women, even when Miliband’s pledges to cap energy bills and boost wages were tailored by focus group to appeal to constituents like his.

In the Tory high command it was George Osborne who spotted Halfon as a smart practician of “blue collar conservatism”, co-opting his campaigns on emblematic cost-of-living issues such as petrol duties and hospital parking charges. One of the chancellor’s political gifts is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments. (Cameron is much less intellectually curious.) Now the Harlow MP’s mandate will reach beyond policy to inform the way Tory candidates are selected, with an emphasis on diversity of class as much as ethnicity, and the way new supporters are signed up and engaged. The standard model treats members as a resource to serve the party when it should be the other way around: party as a service to its members and their neighbours. Often the first thing new recruits get from HQ is an email begging for time and money.

In typical Labour fashion there are also personal and quasi-theological rivalries over what a ‘movement' means

Some on the Labour side have been banging on about this for years. Individual MPs have embraced innovative local campaigning techniques and urged the party to look more like a movement, less like a machine. In typical Labour fashion there are also personal and quasi-theological rivalries over what a “movement” means in practice and who really gets it. Stella Creasy, the energetic MP for Walthamstow, has made this a central pillar of her bid for the party’s deputy leadership but the field is crowded. She will need more support from parliamentary colleagues if the proposition to change party culture is even to appear on a ballot paper.

Miliband dabbled in this area. He was briefly infatuated with Arnie Graf, an American pioneer of “community organising,” but not committed enough to stop him being bulldozed by the old machine as the election came into view. Party reforms Miliband did introduce were motivated more by panic at accusations of excessive union influence than by affection for grassroots activism.

Meanwhile the system by which Labour MPs publicly nominate candidates for the leadership and deputy leadership militates in favour of the status quo. Endorsements are traded for preferment in future shadow cabinet appointments or favour in elections to select committees. Hope of ascent up the parliamentary pecking order – or fear of a punitive pecking by a rival faction – often comes before appraisal of the arguments.

This jostling for position loosely resembles debate about Labour’s future but it is a Westminster simulation of debate, conducted in coded signals about symbolic policy positions. It neglects big questions about the nature of a modern party. There is a lot of talk about which old message to feed back through the machine in order to win lost voters. There is not enough about treating people in a less mechanistic way so they might want to listen to a new message; or, better still, help decide what the message should be.