Ed Miliband, one of the five Labour leadership contenders, today urged the party to "move on" from the "factionalism and psychodramas" of the party's past.
As the party digested the memoirs of one of the chief architects of New Labour, Lord Mandelson, Miliband said the party should focus on the future.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Miliband said: "I think one of the lessons for Labour is that we do need to move on, we need to move on from some of the psychodramas of the past, some of the factionalism that there was.
"But I think that there's a deeper lesson, which is that if any of us think that we lost the election because of personalities, we are profoundly wrong – there are big issues for us to face up to, about the fact that people lost a sense of who we were and what we believed."
Another leadership contender, Andy Burnham, accused Mandelson of self-indulgence yesterday.And former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott admitted that faction-fighting may have hurt the party the general election.
But Miliband insisted the main problem had been the party's failure to steer a clear policy course.
"We began as the party of the windfall tax on the privatised utilities and the minimum wage in 1997, we ended – despite doing great things – as the party that was defending bank bonuses and a party that was pushing forward ID cards. I think there are profound lessons for us about how we make our values central to what we do."
Miliband is standing against his brother, David, Ed Balls, Diane Abbott and Burnham for the Labour leadership following Gordon Brown's resignation.
In a BBC interview, Balls made a thinly veiled criticism of the Milibands' metroplitanism. He said: "I grew up in Nottingham, before that Norwich. I didn't go on plane until I was 21 and we never went on foreign holidays ... Sometimes I get put down a bit for being a bit provincial and a bit ordinary but that's actually what most people are like."
He described as "a mistake" Labour's claim to be able halve the deficit largely by cutting spending. "In 2009 I thought the pace of deficit reduction through spending cuts was not deliverable," he said.
Meanwhile, the fallout continued from Mandelson's memoirs, The Third Man, the serialisation of which began in the Times today. Over the weekend, Mandelson said he and former prime ministers Tony Blair and Brown had "killed each other" at the height of New Labour infighting.
"The unbridled contempt that some people around Gordon had for Tony and those who worked for him was very destructive," he said in a Times interview.
"They were constantly winding him up – partly because that's what they felt. Partly because that's what they thought he wanted to hear."
But Burnham attacked Mandelson's decision to publish the memoirs. He told the BBC Politics Show yesterday: "There was far too much self-indulgent and egotistical factionalism and people spending their weekends at London dinner parties plotting the demise of other people in the Labour party.
"Quite frankly I've never had a part of that and I don't want any part of that. The net effect of it all was it just made life harder on the doorstep for ordinary Labour party members and activists up and down the country. We need a complete break from all of that – we don't need more of the same and I can bring the change that Labour needs in this next period."
Prescott gave a more measured assessment of Mandelson's decision to publish, but conceded that the party lost the election "when we started attacking each other about Brown and Blair – now being reiterated in Peter's book – and then some of the people on the sides coming in and blaming somebody else".
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