Meanwhile, Andy Burnham, the self-styled People's Poet, risks sounding like a one-man production of the Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch: "I grew up in a shoebox on a motorway and so understand people's problems…" A Scouser to his fingertips Burnham may be, and rightly proud of his origins. But he still went to Cambridge – as indeed did Ms Abbott. In this contest, a degree from Cambridge (as opposed to Oxford) is the mark of the maverick, the Working Class Hero. The four ex-special advisers, led by David Miliband, orchestrated the co-option of Diane Abbott to the shortlist in the interests of "pluralism" and the "new politics". But, in so doing, they merely illustrated how iron is their grip upon the contest.  Yet this is not the most striking aspect of the race. More extraordinary by far is the collective lack of contrition. Yes, the candidates are all prepared, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to turn their backs on the men who made them: to "turn the page from Blair and Brown", as Ed Miliband puts it, or to ditch the "New Labour" name in favour of "Next Labour", as his older brother proposes.  Much the most brutal act of apparent patricide has been committed by Ed Balls, who, in a Guardian interview, identified Gordon Brown's encounter with Gillian Duffy, the 65-year-old woman he called "bigoted", as "a disaster for us". So, Balls was asked, it was Mrs Duffy wot lost it? "No, it was Gordon," replied his one-time protégé.  Does the cock crow when Balls says such things? Maybe not. Balls has also let slip that he is in telephone contact with Brown, who wanted to make him chancellor in 2009 – not least to maximise Balls's chances of succeeding him. I cannot help wondering whether Balls's attacks upon Gordon are made with the latter's connivance, and perhaps even at his instigation. The flipside of Brown's arrogance was always a private tendency to blame himself for everything. Like the horse Boxer in Animal Farm, he would say, "I will work harder" – and did. I think Brown would be more than willing to be blamed personally for Labour's defeat, if his essential analysis – especially on the economy – survived as the party's orthodoxy under the leadership of his closest disciple. What looks like treachery may be a devious plot for ideological continuity: Brownism-without-Brown.  What all the candidates share with Balls is a refusal to display true contrition. Scorning "New Labour" as a reified and now obsolete way of doing things is nothing like enough. Nor is saying you would have voted differently on Iraq if you had known what you know now (three cheers for Burnham for standing by the vote he cast in 2003: that's a mature politician). Nor is it enough to apologise for all the lap-dancing clubs that sprung up in the Labour years, as Ed Miliband did in yesterday's Daily Telegraph.  Where is the candidate ready to say that public service reform of schools and the NHS stalled badly? Which of them will admit that their party's initially sluggish response to the expenses scandal symbolised perfectly its lost radio connection with the electorate? Where is the candidate with the guts to say that the structural deficit got appallingly out of hand under Labour? Instead, Alistair Darling, one of David Miliband's most senior backers, demands a "very big apology" from David Cameron for supposedly exaggerating the nation's economic woes.  David Miliband suffers from being the favourite, folk memory of the leadership challenges that never were, and the ineradicable image of him holding that banana. It is always hard being the dauphin, as Ken Clarke used to complain, and Miliband the Elder has been the favourite since he contemplated running against Brown in 2007.  He will never have the charisma that made his mentor Tony such a formidable showman. As he put it in yesterday's Times: "I don't think I would put being cool as my top quality." More worryingly, he is capable of a hauteur and an offhandedness that would cause him big problems as a party leader. That needs to be schooled out of him, and urgently so.  But his claim to the job is clear: this 44-year-old has packed a lot of experience into his ministerial career, and was a respected foreign secretary on the global stage (not least in the White House) who, had he so wished, could have become the EU's Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. More to the point, Miliband Sr understands that Labour has squandered its image as the party of aspiration and that, until it persuades a new generation of voters that its ambitions for state control, social justice, redistribution of wealth and taxation are compatible with people getting on in life, it has no chance at all of returning to power.  I see the point of David Miliband. The cult of Ed Miliband, on the other hand, leaves me cold, and always has done. Alastair Campbell is surely spot on when he says that Ed is a "nice guy" who would make "the party feel OK about losing". The younger Miliband tickles Labour's tummy on Iraq, Trident, union legislation and high taxation. He looks like Donnie Osmond, talks like a Sesame Street character, and holds views that, in the words of one Blair ally, are "usefully wrong". The sheer novelty of another Miliband entering the race has given Ed considerable momentum. But, as the great director Robert Bresson wrote, "novelty is not originality nor modernity". It is one huge category mistake. Ed Miliband will never be prime minister. You know it, I know it. So why would Labour choose not to know it?  Because, in this case, ignorance is so much easier than undertaking the sweaty, mostly thankless task of plotting a route back to power. David offers his party years and years of work, painful analysis and equally difficult change. Ed offers a big smile, a hug and the warm feeling that all those deep Labour instincts were right all along. Why worry about stuff like electoral reality? Why panic about all those silly Middle Britain voters? Why don't we just relax and be properly Left-wing? All together now: Labour's leaving home, it's leaving home, it's leaving home…
Until it accepts and apologises for its mistakes, the party will never    recapture its connection with the voters