Dawn meetings and discipline How Labour stuck to its programme and secured victory

As the election campaign entered its final week, staff at Labour headquarters were treated to a surprise guest.

- Pippa Crerar

"It is going really well," Tony Blair told them. "I'm not betting on it but..." His audience burst into laughter, the Tory betting scandal still fresh in their minds.

Yet the former prime minister also wanted to reassure the exhausted but excited crowd of about 100 party officials that the role they were playing to bring Labour "back from the brink of extinction" and within touching distance of power was crucial.

"When you get in, there's so much more you are able to do. A whole set of possibilities open up," he told them.

By any measure, Labour's campaign was a huge success, with the party's laser-like focus on winning votes where they mattered, taking dozens of swing seats, rather than piling up support in its safest constituencies, and securing what one aide described as "Starmergeddon".

"It has been by far the most disciplined and impressive campaign I've worked on by some distance," said a veteran of several Labour election contests. "The campaign we've talked about from the start is exactly the one we've run. Even in the trickier moments we've had real clarity of purpose. Keeping that discipline, even if not the sexiest thing in the world, has been absolutely central to that."

The drivers of that approach have been the party's two campaign chiefs - Morgan McSweeney and the veteran Labour MP Pat McFadden - who have been spending more than 14 hours a day in what they jokingly refer to as "the cell".

One campaign insider said: "They have that ability to think clearly about where we are, rather than getting caught up in the moment. Pat's temperament suits that perfectly." McFadden has been described - ironically-by another colleague as a "ray of sunshine".