When Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour party in 2010, a delighted Neil Kinnock was famously reported as saying, “I’ve got my party back.” As the results of the 2015 election began coming in, it was clear that Kinnock was disastrously right. The man who led Labour to two defeats in 1987 and 1992 now has a party with which he can be comfortably familiar, after notching up another pair of nationwide election losses under Gordon Brown in 2010 and now Miliband in 2015.

It has always been clear that Miliband has been following a targeted electoral strategy. The generous view is that he believes that, after the financial crisis, there is a winning coalition to be built from core Labour voters, disillusioned Liberal Democrats and middle-class sympathisers with the poor. But last night it became clear that this strategy has quite simply failed.

There are many reasons for this failure: the loss of Scotland to the nationalists, the ebbing of English working-class support to Ukip, and the inability to stem the small but significant defection of radical voters to the Greens among them. No one, though, can pretend that Miliband didn’t give it his best shot, or charge that anyone significant in the Labour party undermined his efforts by off-message criticisms. Miliband had an absolutely clear run – and it failed.

The exit poll foreshadowed the miserable story that followed. The first set of results to show the scale of the failure came in London. In Wandsworth, where Labour won all three seats in 1997 and 2001, and held two of the three in 2005, it had strong hopes of recapturing Battersea, especially in the wake of a strong Evening Standard poll across London on Tuesday this week. In the event, the Conservatives increased their majority in Battersea from 12% to 16%, with a 2% swing in a seat where Labour was confident of a strong showing. It was an ominous sign that London, supposedly a banker for Labour gains offsetting the losses in Scotland, would be a tougher battleground than metropolitan confidence had supposed.

It was followed by an even worse setback in Nuneaton, the first non-London Labour-Conservative marginal result to be declared, and 38th on Labour’s target list. Just as in Battersea, the hoped-for Labour gain turned into a strengthened Tory retention of a seat Labour held from 1992 to 2010. Needing a 3% swing from the Tories, Labour’s Vicky Fowler found herself instead on the wrong end of a 3% swing to the Tories. With Labour also falling far short in Swindon North in one of the earliest declarations in southern England, and Ukip pressing hard in the north, there was beginning to be an ominous consistency to the results for Labour in England, never mind the tsunami in Scotland.

The full accounting of the 2015 Labour defeat must await the final picture. It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that a combination of genuine economic confidence among the majority of voters who are not on zero-hours contracts or reliant on food banks, combined with fear of the Scottish nationalists, did enough to tilt the contest in England more firmly in David Cameron’s direction than any poll came even close to showing, or many observers could bring themselves to believe.

Many were poised on Wednesday, as the polls narrowed, to conclude that Miliband would deserve huge personal credit for sticking to what seemed potentially to be a modestly successful Labour strategy through the campaign. Now, on Friday, those enthusiasts must confront the question of responsibility for what has turned into a failed strategy, about which far too many on the left were far too sanguine and self-deceiving for far too long. They got their party back. And look what has happened. Now what?