Labour has had a tough few weeks – now the campaign is in the hands of the unsung heroes

One final day of campaigning. 10 visits in five regions – London, the South East, the east of England, the East Midlands and Yorkshire & Humberside (including a visit to his constituency of Doncaster North) – mean that Ed Miliband will have a frenetic and exhausting end to the campaign. That might mean he’ll struggle to spend time today thinking about what the successes and failures of this general election dress rehearsal have been – but over the weekend those thoughts must be paramount.

Should Labour triumph in the European elections – a result that is possible with good turnout, but unlikely – the Labour leader may think he’s learned some valuable lessons about his own abilities, and those of his campaign team. They will have been tested in the heat of a difficult election campaign and come out intact.

But if Labour falls behind UKIP in the European elections – as looks possible according to most of the polls – the reckoning will need to be far harsher. He should be asking why he unveiled strong policies on rents and the minimum wage only to see them largely ignored by the central campaign. He’ll want to question how Labour’s vote lead was able to slip away to UKIP with barely a murmur of counterattack. He’ll want to ask why posters on VAT hikes went out with barely a VAT-able item on them, and weren’t shown to the Shadow Treasury team either.

He’ll also need to acknowledge his own failings though. Local radio interviewers will today be out to repeat the success of the BBC Radio Wiltshire presenter who showed Miliband up so painfully yesterday. Of course the Labour leader can’t be expected to know the name of every Labour group and council leader in Britain. But if you’re campaigning in a local area you should at least have that kind of data at your fingertips, because a gotcha moment is always lurking around the corner.

You need to be better prepared than that, especially if you’re about to feel the full weight of the British media coming down on you like a ton of bricks over the past year. A bad local media interview is no longer a temporary problem in one area, in the age of the internet, a bad local media interview becomes “Miliband’s local radio car crash” within minutes, and is picked up by every hostile media outlet going. The same goes for the entirely forgivable error of slightly underestimating the cost of your weekly shop. Both unforced errors could have been avoided, perhaps, by the broadcasting expert that Miliband is still planning to hire.

Labour has undoubtedly had a tough few weeks, but that can be used to the party’s advantage in the months ahead. The Tories have been playing to lose in the European and Local elections. So when they meet their expectations, they will have learned little. Labour has been playing to win, so where we win we can learn what we did right. Where we lose – and inevitably there will be places where we lose – we can learn lessons too. Now though, despite Miliband’s punishing final 24 hours of campaigning, the results we’ll be examining in depth are no longer in his hands.

Across Britain committee rooms are being set up, eve of poll leaflets and letters are being printed and activists are preparing to spend up to 15 hours on the doorstep tomorrow. The campaign is no longer in the hands of those who wage air war – it’s in the hands of the unsung party heroes who fight the ground war. Every council seat that changes hands is down to the hard work and dedication of party members who’ve fought for months – often years – to see that happen. Every council that we win is the result of dedication and often painfully hard work – not a dry statistic to be discussed only in terms of what this means for other elections, other people and other places.

Labour’s campaign is in the hands of the unsung heroes now. They’ve got a punishing 48 hours ahead of them – but there’s no-one I’d rather see take us to the finishing line. If you’re out campaigning – thank you, and good luck.