THE Financial Times believed, or so it said at the weekend, that Ed Miliband had made an attempt to shift the party back towards its left-wing roots. It said that attempt was what ended in Ed Miliband’s resignation speech on Friday morning after Labour’s worst general election result since 1987.

Well there’s cuckoo land and there’s cuckoo land — and the FT clearly resides in one of them — because the poll results tell an entirely different story.

In contrast to FT chief political correspondent Jim Pickard’s weird assessment of Miliband as a secret agent for the left, a cross between Machiavelli and James Bond, the policies that Labour drove nationally reflected an indecisive confusion about what the party really stood for, with many more right-wing overtones than there were left-wing positions.

But for the real figure, let’s look at where Labour’s message wasn’t so confused.

Take, for example, Wansbeck MP Ian Lavery: as good a specimen of a committed leftwinger as you’ll find in Labour’s ranks.

Despite the national disappointment for the Labour Party, he increased his vote to 19,267 and his majority to 10,881, getting 50 per cent of the votes cast in his constituency.

His Conservative rival Chris Galley came a dreary second with 8,386 votes, ahead of the Ukip hopeful Melanie Hurst who got 7,014 votes.

And, of course, the Liberal Democrats were the biggest losers, slipping from 10,517 votes in 2010 to just 2,407.

Mr Lavery first took his seat in 2010, with a majority of 7,031.

Chairman of the trade union group of MPs, he has adopted a consistently progressive position in Parliament ever since.

He was appointed as parliamentary private secretary to Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, but was forced to resign in 2012 after resisting the party whip over increasing the pension age.

He was one of 16 signatories of an open letter to Ed Miliband in January 2015, calling on the party to commit to oppose further austerity, take rail franchises back into public ownership and strengthen collective bargaining arrangements.

But lest we think this is just a mining-area triumph for a comparatively new MP, we can go to the other end of the calender spectrum and look at Labour left veteran Jeremy Corbyn, who retained his Islington North seat, eclipsing Conservative rival Alex Burghart by a majority of 21,194

Corbyn, who has represented the constituency since 1983, topped his 2010 majority of 12,401 by 8,793 votes after securing an overall vote of 29,659.

We don’t need to recycle Corbyn’s honourable record — it would be a matter of pride for any leftwinger.

Lib Dem Julian Gregory dropped from second to fourth place, attracting 3,984 votes.

There were 49,449 votes cast, giving a turnout of 67.4 per cent — up almost 2 per cent from the last general election.

It was Comrade Corbyn’s biggest ever victory in his eighth term in Parliament.

And for an even longer record, and one no less honourable, take a butcher’s at Labour stalwart Dennis Skinner who again retained his Bolsover seat, which he has held since 1970, with a massive majority.

The 83-year-old came away with 51.2 per cent of the vote — more than double that of Tory opponent Peter Bedford.

Skinner received a total of 22,543 (51.2 per cent) compared with Bedford’s 10,764 (24.5 per cent).

Ukip came close behind the Tories with 9,228 votes (21 per cent) while the Liberal Democrats’ David Lomax managed just 1,464 votes (3.3 per cent).

We could go on through a catalogue of leftwingers and show the same trend in many of them.

There’s Dave Anderson in Blaydon, whose majority went from 9,117 to 14,227; and John Cryer, who was re-elected for Leyton and Wanstead, taking a massive 58.6 per cent of the vote, winning 23,858 votes — up on his 2010 score of 17,511.

There’s Fabian Hamilton in Leeds North East, who won with Labour’s biggest-ever majority in the seat; Kelvin Hopkins in Luton North, who increased his majority from 2010, nearly double the Tory vote, and, of course John McDonnell in Hayes and Harlington, who was elected for the fifth time, increasing his share of the poll from 54 per cent in 2010 to 59 per cent in 2015.

Although there are some sad exceptions which will cost Labour dear, including Katy Clark and Ian Davidson, who fell in the Scots debacle.

But that was hardly their fault.

Scottish Labour’s choice of crass rightwinger Jim Murphy to lead them contributed heavily to their disastrous campaign in Scotland.

Let’s be honest, what decent leftwinger could vote for a party led by this monstrosity?

Murphy, to quote the Scottish Left Project, is almost certainly the most right-wing leader in Labour history in any part of Britain.

He’s an open neocon and spearheads its effort to spread that pernicious US philosophy in Britain. He’s pro-Israel and anti-boycott, and hostile to trade union efforts on behalf of their Palestinian comrades.

Domestically he’s pro-business in all his policies and so unprincipled that even after the catastrophic result under his leadership, including losing his own seat, he’s refusing to resign — at least, so far.

This is the man who Labour put forward as a leader in Scotland. Is it any wonder that the SNP swept the board so thoroughly?

So back to the Financial Times. Where’s the evidence that Ed Miliband was a secret Bolshie, that he moved the Labour Party very far to the left and that being left-wing harms the chances of Labour MPs?

The simple answer is that such evidence doesn’t exist and the Financial Times’s “case” is blatantly self-serving on behalf of its speculator client base — I won’t call them readers.

It’s an attempt to influence Labour’s choice of its next leader in a business-friendly direction and thus crucify the party in its relations with its core voters: working people who, despite such condescending flim-flammery from the voice of the profiteers and city gamblers, know damn well what side their bread’s buttered on.