Pushed to the point of extinction in Scotland and failing to make any real progress in England, Labour closes election 2015 with another of the great defeats that define so much of the party’s history. Recovering from this will be at least as difficult as it ever has been in the past and probably more difficult still. Like other centre-left parties in Europe, it is by now well used to swimming against deep tides of deindustrialisation, deunionisation and consumerism; but it now has to reckon with a chilling current of nationalist separatism too.

The party will not be helped in the daunting challenge ahead by the quickfire way in which Ed Miliband has resigned. A merciless media pack expects a new face in such circumstances and Mr Miliband no doubt concluded that he had no choice but to go at once. Having had a clear run of five years in which to develop and deploy a strategy that has failed, it is after all absolutely apparent that he was not going to be on the cover of the Labour manifesto for 2020. But what Labour needs in the first few traumatised months after its routing is not, in fact, a new face but time to reflect. Rumours about Chuka Umunna starting to put in phone calls to fellow MPs are not going to help anybody distil the lessons that patiently need to be learnt from the Miliband years, and the ultimate Miliband failure.

In trying to make sense of a defeat on a scale that so few expected, one moment of the short election campaign stands out in retrospective significance. Mr Miliband’s battering at the hands of a Question Time audience about Labour’s record on public expenditure revealed a failure that traces right back to 2010. Relieved of the burdens of office and with another leader walking away within days of defeat, Labour indulged in rather introverted discussion about its next leader. It missed the critical opportunity to take on the coalition narrative that Britain had been left bust by excessive social expenditure, as opposed to being bankrupted by the bankers. It then compounded the error by failing to maintain a consistent, intelligible message about how Britain might grow its way out of debt.

On top of this failure of political direction came a failure of strategy. There was a certain on-paper plausibility to the calculation that envisaged that Labour could creep over the line with 35% of the vote, by holding on to all of Gordon Brown’s 2010 vote and then adding a chunk of disillusioned Lib Dems. Some extra voters were won over, but nothing like enough. Others flaked off to Ukip, the Greens and above all the Scottish Nationalists, while the Lib Dem deserters did not in the end come more or less en masse to Labour as had been assumed, but were instead shared with the Conservatives. As the Democrats have often found in the US, when they have tried to construct rainbow coalitions out of class- and colour-defined blocs of the population, groups that can be counted on wholesale in theory often splinter into individuals that it may not be possible to count on at all. Labour must again learn to tell stories, in a voice – and perhaps an accent – that speaks to the individual ear, and the country as a whole.

In part, this is about ditching jargon, resolving the uneasy inheritance of the New Labour years and finding a new facility to deploy moral arguments instead of the dismal lexicon of technocracy. Partly, however, it is about asking the right questions and then suggesting plausible answers. Mr Miliband was good at the first part of that. He grasped quickly how Britain is lapsing into an insider-outsider economy, which provides security for those with secure jobs and property, but the opposite for the many locked out. He correctly identified the warning lights flashing on the British way of business: zero-hour contracts, the squeeze on pay, casualisation; and he pointed to the lesson of the US, where much of this has become permanent, and the typical working man has seen his wages stagnate since 1973 and where working women are increasingly struggling too.

When it came to answers to these questions, however, Mr Miliband’s party was always more circumspect. There were, for example, interesting hints in the manifesto about tweaking City rules to get a grip on top pay and even a hint about industrial democracy. At the end of his five-year mission, however, we might have expected more than hints. What Labour needs most urgently now is not soul-searching or a hunt for first principles, but instead to figure out how to convert these principles into the sort of policies that might just catch the ear of a radio listener or TV viewer who is only half paying attention, and which the next party leader will be able to use to unfold the intelligible story that Mr Miliband was not in the end able to tell.