Brotherly love | 22 July 2010

Ed Miliband will give his second preference vote in the Labour leadership contender to his brother, he tells the New Statesman’s Jason Cowley.
 
The Ed Miliband interview is part of a really rich set of profiles of the Labour leadership candidates. Diane Abbott inadvertently reveals that it is David Miliband who is taking the duties of a future Labour leader most seriously with her complaint that he is the leadership candidate who insisted on a meeting to find out what the duties of the victorious candidate would be at conference. 
 
Both Eds offer quite left-wing prospectuses. Ed Balls argues that Labour didn’t lose because it lost touch with ‘middle England’. Rather, Labour’s defeat “was about lower-income voters feeling Labour wasn’t standing up for them.” Ed Miliband says that’ll have to ‘convince people that tax is the price we pay for the good society, and not simply a burden’.
 
One other thing that stood out to me is that only one of the five candidates has taken drugs.