After the events of the last few days, I feel compelled to write my thoughts down. Not because I imagine for a moment that anyone will particularly want to read them, nor necessarily that they will add anything to what I imagine will be the millions and millions of words written over the next few days, weeks and months about the future of the Labour party. But because my mind is swimming with a number of confusing thoughts at the moment, and getting them down on paper seems like as good a way as any to try to make sense of them.

The starting gun has already been fired on the next leadership race; I suppose you could argue it was from the moment that shocking exit poll came in – or if not precisely at that point, then certainly a few hours later as it became obvious that the poll was right.

I don’t want to say now who I think would be best to lead the party, nor point the finger at whatever I perceive to be the mistakes of Ed Miliband, his team and the election campaign. Instead, I just want to get down a few thoughts on where we go from here, and how we should conduct ourselves.

Early on Friday morning, Rafael Behr had an article in the Guardian setting out one of the key challenges that Ed Miliband faced in his time in office, and that the next leader will face again, probably to an even more acute degree: whether the Labour party is not in power because it has lost sight of its core values and been outflanked to the left by the likes of the Scottish National Party, or whether the problem lies in having vacated the centre ground and seen it occupied instead by the Conservatives. Behr suggests that Miliband tried to split the difference between the two and ended up pleasing no one.

Behr is too good a journalist and too sophisticated a political analyst to suggest that the choice is really as crude as picking between a “retreat to the unelectable comfort ground of the left” and an “unprincipled rush to appease Middle England” as critics of either approach will typify them. But what worries me is that the choice will increasingly be painted in such terms as the leadership debate takes place over the coming weeks.

There will be a candidate of the left, unfairly criticised as being in the pockets of the unions. There will be a candidate of the right, lazily branded as ‘Blairite’ for wanting to win over those who voted Conservative this time around. Battle lines will be drawn; factions will be formed. Twitter will become the public arena in which this red-on-red warfare will be conducted. Tories will (rightly) rub their hands with glee and get on with implementing their first 100 days of a majority government safe in the knowledge that the opposition is barely looking.

The problem with us characterising leadership candidates as ‘left’ or ‘right’, and assessing them based on which particular demographic groups they would aim to attract, is that we are jumping straight past strategy and on to tactics. You shouldn’t be picking a target audience, much less a communications plan, until you have a clear understanding of two essential precursors: your values and your vision.

That’s what I will be looking for from anybody who wants my vote to lead the Labour party. What are their values? How do they articulate them, and how do they practise them? Stemming from those values, what is their vision for the country? What is their vision for the Labour party?

When I worked at Shelter, one of the most impressive things about the organisation was that you could ask anyone in the building – anyone, from the fundraising team to the finance team, from the solicitors providing frontline advice to the graphic designers producing leaflets and posters – and they could all tell you the charity’s stated vision. That is no mean feat, and it is the kind of thing that Labour should seek to emulate.

Because if we get that right, then the other debates – about which policies to pursue, and how to articulate them to a sceptical public – become easier to have. We will realise that both ‘left’ and ‘right’ are correct in certain things. ‘Winning an election’ cannot be an objective in its own right because it is meaningless (and ultimately unachievable) if you have no idea of what you would do after you’d won it. But any lofty set of political goals that don’t include the pretty central milestone ‘then win the election’ aren’t going to be much cop either.

In fact, I think that what we will find is that if someone in this leadership campaign sets out a vision for the future, and a set of values that they hold dear, then it will be possible to satisfy both the left and the right of the party.  And mostly because we will realise that those labels are at best only partial and at worst meaningless.

People across the country are able to hold certain views that could be characterised as left and others that can be seen as right simultaneously.  Someone who is concerned about the state dictating the minutiae of what their children learn at school can at the same time want to see government step in and nationalise the railways.  They manage to believe both things at the same time without their heads exploding.

Why can’t the same be true of a party?  There will be areas of policy in which the way to demonstrate our values and achieve our vision will be to propose something that instinctively appeals to the kind of voters who thought the SNP and Greens were a better bet this time around. There will be others where the best route to achieving the vision is by doing something that those who waver between voting Conservative (or UKIP) and Labour will be attracted by.

This might seem naïve, or at least overly optimistic. I don’t think it needs to be. But it will require all of us as Labour members to heed the advice that Ed Miliband gave in his resignation speech and conduct the leadership election with the same sense of dignity and unity that the election campaign was conducted.

And as well as Ed Miliband’s speech, we could also learn a lot from the incredibly moving final speech that Nick Clegg gave as Liberal Democrat leader. I don’t agree with everything that Clegg puts forward, but I can respect what was an intellectually coherent, ambitious and heartfelt attempt to define what it means to be a liberal in the early 21^st century.

The candidate who can set out in the same way what it means to be a social democrat at this dark time will get my vote, irrespective of the background they come from or the supposed ‘faction’ they represent.