Writing in advance on Labour’s leadership result I made the point that the electoral college that elects the leader and deputy leader is a good mechanism for reflecting the collective view of the movement and, since the removal of the block vote under John Smith’s leadership, has encompassed something as close to a ‘primary’ as we have in UK politics.

I am not about to change my view of the system because, for the first time, a victorious leader did not command the majority support of all sections of the electoral college. That was almost certain to happen in a contest as close as this one. Unfortunately for David Miliband it was a case of two out of three ain’t good enough. But for Ed as well as David on this occasion the electoral college failed, not because individual Brothers* swayed the result in favour of Little Brother, but because the imbalance of the three sections presented the new leader with an instant PR problem of the type, as I pointed out during the campaign, he was well aware of and would have preferred to avoid.

In the greater scheme of things Ed Miliband will have bigger PR problems to overcome than this if he is to make a decent fist of leading Labour. He made a reasonable start on Andrew Marr’s BBC show, it was a solid performance in a no win situation where the priority was not to make daft mistakes. At least in Manchester he is unlikely to fall into the sea! Tuesday will tell us more.

So why did this usually effective system fail on this occasion? To explain requires some simple arithmetic. The college divides into thirds – MPs and MEPs, individual members and affiliated members. The sections reflect the sections of the party which a leader must reach out to: leading the Parliamentary Party, inspiring the members, reaching out to the wider public, starting with Labour supporters of which trade union members are part (and who, as they pay their money to Labour, deserve a say). But the fact is the electoral college is only as strong as the movement of which it is part. Labour’s membership has declined significantly since the mechanism was last used to elect a leader and trade union membership in hardly a picture of health either. Elections are frequently about differential turnouts. Among Individual members the turnout was around 70% – pretty comparable to a General Election. When you allow for the inevitable inaccuracy in the electoral roll – at best 90% so 70% is more like 80-85%. This means the result in the members’ section was certainly representative. Among affiliates, however, the picture is different. Here turnouts were in the range of 10% which, though that may be more like 15% given that TU rolls are likely to be significantly less accurate than the Party roll, is still pretty poor. At these levels the ballot is reaching not greatly beyond the activist tier. It would be ridiculous to blame Ed Miliband for proving capable of winning in this section (largely through amassing second and third preferences), the failure was Big Brother’s. Polls and all the anecdotal evidence I encountered supported the view that Miliband D was the candidate with most appeal to the wider electorate . But had that appeal been significantly greater the surely DM could have been expected to motivate more non-activist affiliated members to return their ballots in his favour. The fact is the contest did not inspire. It would have been a stretch to imagine it would have, but that doesn’t mean the new leader can’t do so, given time and well used profile.

Several commentators, some hostile to Labour, others less so, have raised the question of individuals with multiple votes, some even suggesting that those with multiple votes could have influenced the outcome of the result in what was, after all, a close contest. Whatever their motives, they are just wrong.

This is more complex to explain. The principles of the college mean that, because the three electorates are of different sizes and different numbers of votes are cast, an individual vote, though of equal value in that section, has a different value when compared to individual votes in other sections. In this case if an individual member’s vote is worth one, an MP’s vote is worth approximately 477 and an affiliated member’s vote is worth 0.6 in term of how they affect the overall outcome. The largest number of ‘plural’ voters by far are individual members who also vote as affiliated members – a reasonable assumption would be a maximum of 40%. In that case for this segment to have tipped the result it would have had collectively to have backed Ed Miliband (in the final round) by a margin of more than two to one. This would have been massively out of line with voting pattern among individual members in general and, while not impossible, such a variance is highly improbable. It’s a red herring, it didn’t happen simple as that. As for people with four or five votes – a cursory glance shows those numbers are tiny, almost certain split evenly and irrelevant to the overall outcome. The problem with multiple votes is not that they affect the result, it is that the practice LOOKS dodgy.**

Where the result could have been easily been different was among MPs and MEPs. It would have taken only six parliamentarians to switch from EM to DM on the final ballot to have seen a different outcome. However good a mechanism Labour’s electoral college might be that isn’t to say it can’t be improved upon, not least by extending its scope to a more representative cross section of Labour support – though one suspects Leader Ed will have more pressing priorities.

The maths of this result certainly mean that the wicket on which Leader Ed goes into bat favours the bowlers. When that’s the case it is advisable is to play with a straight bat and get on the front foot. The circumstance force Leader Ed to reach out beyond those who supported him, to build consensus and win political arguments rather than seek political fixes (he could do worse than start with Alan Johnson’s excellent advice – Independent of Sunday 26 September). This is all to the good as Labour has long needed such a settlement. With the first preference support of less than one third of MPs and fewer than 3 in 10 individual members he has no other choice.

* And before you yell, I know it’s Brothers and Sisters – but if you thing I’m going to let that get in the way of a joke you fall into the category of ‘humourless politically correct obsessive who should get out more’, probably.

** It is also highly unlikely that the many ‘spoilt’ papers had any affect on the outcome. They will almost certainly have followed the same pattern as the rest of the section – Florida 2000 this was not.