The results of the British Labour Party leadership election will be announced tomorrow. The voting closed on Wednesday. And the polls suggest that three of the five candidates have no chance of winning. The real battle is between two brothers, David and Edward Miliband, with the former having a slight lead over his younger brother in the polls.

I have been struck by how little interest the campaign has generated in the UK itself. Granted, it began in May, a long time ago by a political yardstick. However, it never seemed to be generating any strong public interest, even though the result can be an upset. For the voting system permits voters to express a second preference, which means that David, the favourite on first preferences, might still lose.

In a way, the lack of interest is a good sign for Labour. There is nothing more fascinating in politics than a party in self-destruct mode, while nothing presses that button more decisively than a perceived battle for a party’s soul. However, this leadership campaign has been civil in tone. While Labour’s path back to government from the wilderness is at stake, the fact that the contest has attracted relatively mild attention suggests that the public perceives neither a life-or-death struggle within the party nor the need for one.

I would think that that judgment is correct. Indeed, I am none too sure that “wilderness” is a good term to describe Labour’s current position.

It is true that Prime Minister David Cameron is personally popular and that his party is perceived, according to some polls, to have more talent than Labour. I am also aware that adding the Conservative and Liberal Democrat ratings together gives the government a popularity rating well above 50 per cent.

However, do not underestimate Labour’s chances. Its electoral result was better than expected. With some 250 seats the party has a very good launch pad in the next general election. And while the UK government is still enjoying a honeymoon, its drastic plans to reduce the deficit, which will bite hard and cost jobs, is going to cost it votes. Indeed, it may wreck the coalition. The next Labour leader may be Prime Minister sooner than we think.

It is important, therefore, that Labour elects a leader who can retain its reputation as a party of government. Arguably, however, both of the Miliband brothers, as well as another candidate, Ed Balls, can achieve that. So what is at stake?

To answer that question, one must peer into the shadows of this election. There one will not find Gordon Brown. Everyone seems agreed that he was not an able leader, although hugely gifted in many other ways. In this respect, Mr Brown is not a controversial figure haunting this election, even though two of the candidates, the two Eds (Miliband and Balls) were associated with his faction in the golden New Labour years.

No, the ghost is Tony Blair and his legacy. In his just published autobiography, Mr Blair nails his colours to the mast very firmly. He believes Labour lost the election because it strayed from the course he set it on. (He does not blame the decision to go to war with Iraq as he had himself won a general election two years after that decision.)

Labour, according to Mr Blair, should have stuck to its reformist agenda and continued to consider the whole of middle England as its core vote.

That is not the only possible view, of course. Some observers point out that of the several million votes that Labour lost over the 13 years it was in power, only around 20 per cent went to the Conservatives. The conclusion, according to these observers, is that Labour under Mr Blair went too far to the right. Therefore it needs to recover its centre-left bearings.

Yet a third view is that the party went both too far and not enough. It is a less confusing diagnosis than it might first seem. The essential thrust is that fairness is a basic Labour value and that modernisation of the progressive agenda required confronting both left-wing and right-wing establishments and vested interests. Under Mr Blair, Labour took on the left-wing but baulked at right-wing establishments; under Mr Brown, the opposite occurred.

According to this view, the new Labour leader has the opportunity to bring together what the Blair-Brown rivalry had artificially kept apart. A holistic reformist agenda would both build on the achievements of the Blair years, which include earning the trust of the majority of the electorate, and pay a greater attention to social justice, which is what Mr Brown would have wanted to do, had it not been for the many crises he had to face.

Tomorrow’s result will tell us what Labour’s core vote thinks about these issues.

Dr Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.