Brotherly love no issue in Labour fight, say Milibands (Feature)

By Anna Tomforde May 18, 2010, 3:06 GMT

London - It is said of the Miliband brothers that when they were teenagers David became totally absorbed in high-brow political debate while the younger Ed peeled off to the TV room to watch a US soap opera.

Now both, David, 44, Britain's former Foreign Secretary, and Ed, 40, are competing to become the next leader of the Labour Party, defeated after 13 years in power at the May 6 general election.

They have mutually vowed that the fight will not spoil friendship and brotherhood in what the Times has called a 'Cain and Abel scenario.'

'I love David, he's my best friend in life and it's been one of the hardest decisions I've made in my life whether to stand against him,' Ed Miliband confessed in a recent media interview.

'Family is more important than politics,' insisted David, conceding that his younger brother was 'very talented.'

'I love him. We're not going to put that love at risk,' promised David.

Both Milibands have served as ministers in Labour governments. David Miliband, nicknamed 'brainbox,' joined the government of ex-prime minister Tony Blair in 2005, Ed Miliband became a member of the first Gordon Brown cabinet and was made Energy and Climate Change Secretary in 2008.

As a key Labour strategist, David practically wrote the New Labour script for Blair ahead of the landslide 1997 election victory, while Ed's career is closely linked to Brown.

However, both brothers insist that the battle between Old Labour and New Labour is over, and that, during its new period in opposition, the Labour Party must reform itself from top to bottom.

'Anyone who thinks that the future is about re-creating New Labour is wrong. New Labour was a reaction to the 1980s but it was trapped by the 1980s,' David Miliband told the Observer newspaper.

The battle between so-called Blairites and Brownites was 'gone and over,' said David who, according to bookmakers and opinion polls, is seen as the front runner in the leadership contest, due to be decided by September.

While David describes himself as an idealist, his younger brother is seen by many as the party's 'rising star.' He is portrayed as a bridge builder and a peacemaker, while David can appear 'arrogant and rude,' wrote the Evening Standard.

'Under Ed's leadership, Labour can rediscover its soul and its ability to inspire modern Britain again,' said one of his prominent backers, Labour Party veteran Peter Hain.

'Ed is the future,' Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour, was reported to have said following the change of government to a Conservative-led coalition last week.

Therefore, despite what the brothers say - or wish - theirs is likely to be a tough fight for the Labour crown.

Intellectually, both are well equipped for the job, with each holding a degree in politics from Oxford University and looking back on a meteoric career in the Labour Party.

Both have imbibed politics with their mother's milk.

Their late father, the Polish-born Marxist political theorist Ralph Miliband, became one of Britain's most celebrated left-wing intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s. He died in 1994.

Having fled Poland in 1940, accompanied by his father, the two men caught the last ferry to Britain from Ostend before Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany.

Their mother, Marion Kozak, now aged 75, was born to Jewish parents in Czestochowa, southern Poland, where they owned a steel factory .

After a miraculous journey of survival, she arrived in Britain in 1947, aged 12. She later met Ralph whose classes she attended as a student at the London School of Economics.

The Milibands lost 80 members of their family in the Holocaust, many at the Auschwitz death camp.

'I am fortunate in that it is my parents' generation that encountered fascism, not me,' David Miliband said during a Polish visit in 2009.

Their mother would, however, have to stay 'neutral' in the forthcoming political fight, he remarked recently.

'She has taught us a lot about the causes that matter and this is a cause she is going to have to sit out.'