On 3 May 2015, just four days before the general election, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, unveiled a large stone monolith on which was carved six election pledges.

The 8ft 6in limestone tablet, quickly dubbed the “EdStone”, was presented at a press event in Hastings as a symbol of Labour’s commitment to its promises.

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Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2010, narrowly defeating his older brother and former foreign secretary David Miliband. Throughout the 2015 general election campaign, a steady stream of polls from all the major companies appeared to show the Conservative and Labour parties as effectively neck-and-neck.

Miliband sought to shore up support for his party with a literally monumental pledge card, distilling his political platform into six pithy promises.

The six vague-sounding vows featured on Miliband’s monolith were as follows:

• A strong economic foundation
• Higher living standards for working families
• An NHS with the time to care
• Controls on immigration
• A country where the next generation can do better than the last
• Homes to buy and action on rent

Speaking at the Ed-Stone’s unveiling, Miliband said he planned to place the stone slab in the Downing Street Rose Garden.

The stunt was met with immediate and widespread ridicule from the media, political opponents and the public. Critics compared it unfavourably to a tombstone and the Ten Commandments.

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David Cameron, the Conservative leader and incumbent prime minister, remarked: “If you’ve got a problem with judgement… I don’t think [an 8ft 6in limestone tablet] is going to help.”

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said there was “nothing attractive about the instability of a hapless Labour minority administration, regardless of these great gravestones they are apparently going to erect”.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London who was standing as a Conservative candidate, dismissed the stone as a “weird commie slab”.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson added: “What was he drinking? What was he smoking? What was he on when he came up with this one?

“Keep taking the tablets, Ed – don’t erect them in government offices.”

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The saga surrounding the slab descended further into farce when Lucy Powell, vice-chair of Labour’s election campaign, suggested Miliband might break the promises he had carved into it.

Committing a gaffe about a gaffe, Powell said: “I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he’s carved them into stone means that he is absolutely not going to break them or anything like that.”

Miliband, responding to the ridicule, suggested the stone could symbolise the “trust” Labour would restore if elected.

He told BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme: “Our pledges are carved in stone. I think trust is a huge issue in this election – the difference with our pledges is they are not going to expire on 8 May.

“Nick Clegg went into the last election saying he’d cut tuition fees – he trebled them. David Cameron went into the last election, saying ‘no ifs no buts – net migration into the tens of thousands’ – it’s 298,000.

“We’re setting out promises – they don’t expire on May 8. They don’t disappear.”

The EdStone remains one of the abiding images of this era in British politics – a rocky reminder of a misjudged election campaign. The apparent absurdity continued when the Labour Party was fined £20,000 by the electoral commission after it left two payments which related to the slab, totalling £7,614, off its election campaign spending return.

Today the Edstone stands somewhere as a limestone testament to election campaign gaffes everywhere.

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