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It is six o’clock on a Wednesday evening in north London, and despite the rush-hour traffic, the streets around the Edgware Road subway station are nearly deserted as people seek shelter from a cold and miserable rain. Inside the King Solomon Academy, a non-denominational neighbourhood school, one of two men closing in on the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party is making his pitch to the 200 people who have packed the school’s auditorium.
Five months ago, David Miliband was foreign secretary in then-prime minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet. Now he, like the rest of the Labour Party, is out of power and facing a long road to get it back. Labour earned its second-lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage in the May election, and in David Cameron it confronts a popular prime minister who leads an unexpectedly functional coalition government with the Liberal Democrat party.
It’s a big hill to climb, and in person Miliband is hardly the sort of figure to inspire dizzying optimism among his supporters. At 45, he’s young as politicians go, tall and handsome. But he’s also a stiff and methodical speaker. At the King Solomon Academy, he stands behind a podium, gripping the lectern. He wears a purple tie with a thin knot and rocks gently from side to side as he talks.
Miliband begins by thanking his audience for their “friendship and comradeship.” It’s an odd choice of words. Miliband cut his political teeth crafting policy for Tony Blair’s “New Labour” movement, which sought to expand Labour’s support beyond its blue-collar roots to the middle classes—people who don’t often call each other “comrade.”
Tony Blair has since fallen out of favour with much of the Labour Party—his three consecutive majority governments be damned—but many of David Miliband’s supporters see him as someone who can similarly stretch the party’s support base. “I’m not making my decision on minor policy nuances,” David Browne, a north London Labour councillor at the Miliband event, says. “I’m basing it on who is the best person for the job. The job is to be prime minister, not just Labour leader.”
Miliband works on this theme in his speech. “We have spent too much time looking inwards and backwards and not enough time looking forwards and outwards for new ideas and for a new relationship with voters,” he says. “To win again we need working-class voters, middle-class voters, Conservative voters, Liberal Democrats and non-voters, as we drive the Tories out of power.”
Why, then, this talk about comradeship? It’s because David is threatened on his left flank by the second man with a chance to win the Labour leadership: Ed Miliband, his brother.
After years watching former friends Tony Blair and Gordon Brown divide their party, Labour has now taken sibling rivalry from the metaphoric to the literal. “You have to feel that it’s a continuation of some sort of terrible fight they had as kids,” says Simon Hoggart, parliamentary sketch writer for the Guardian newspaper, in an interview with Maclean’s. “Maybe one took the other’s wind-up car and broke it.”
Ed Miliband represents Labour’s historic base. He argues Labour did not lose in May because they failed to connect with centrist voters, but because their traditional supporters abandoned them. Labour needs to bring back voters who left the party because they believe it has become too arrogant, Sadiq Khan, a Labour MP and Ed’s campaign agent, tells Maclean’s. “What we can’t do is dust off the 1997 manual,” he adds, referring to Tony Blair’s first election manifesto, which, actually, David Miliband wrote.
Two days after his brother spoke to supporters at the King Solomon Academy, Ed Miliband holds a question-and-answer session in a university neighbourhood of south London. David’s handlers are young, but the youth surrounding Ed is even more pronounced. He’s popular with students. Several of the more photogenic among them are ushered to stand behind Ed, where television journalists filming the event will see them.
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