I am lucky with my brother John. Although he is 12-and-a-half years older than me, he doesn’t patronise or seek to undermine me. On the contrary, he is wholly supportive of my modest endeavours, whatever they may be. Although, at the end of a successful and varied career as a publisher, author and bookseller, he is still dealing in old books, he doesn’t do as much as he used to. He will be 85 this summer and suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. But he takes a keen interest in whatever I get up to, and he shuffles off to the newsagent to buy any publication that I have written something for. Then he usually rings up to say something nice about it.
Elder brothers are not always like this, as the Pope and the leader of the Labour party can testify. Perhaps, if I had ever achieved any sort of eminence, my brother might be feeling less benign; but I doubt it. By contrast, there are the troubling examples of two other elder brothers, David Miliband and Mgr Georg Ratzinger. One cannot exactly blame David for failing to rejoice at Ed’s usurpation of the job he yearned for. But at the same time Ed’s aides are unpersuasive when they insist that ‘they are brothers first and politicians second’. David and Ed were, of course, ‘brothers first’ in the sense that the blood relationship preceded everything else; but their battle for the Labour leadership seems to have strained their brotherly love to breaking point. And while David has tried to appear gracious in defeat, his protestations of loyalty to his younger brother never quite ring true.
Leaving aside the gossip about their private estrangement, there has been enough subtle distancing by David in public to convince people that all is not well between them. There was, most notably, an article by David in the New Statesman earlier this year in which the former foreign secretary poured scorn on the ‘Old Labour’ values of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley who had both extolled Ed’s election as a return to the good old days before the advent of ‘New Labour’. Other reports have portrayed David as waiting in the wings for his brother to fail at the job so that he can make another grab for it. Whether or not that’s true, David’s shadow looms over Ed and lessens his chances of succeeding as opposition leader.
On the other hand, relations between Pope Benedict XVI and his elder brother Georg are reported to be excellent. They talk regularly on the telephone and also make a point of meeting as often as they can. The Pope, who was 85 last Monday, is three years younger than Georg, and both were ordained priests in Munich at the same time in 1951. Joseph Ratzinger went on to become a professor of theology, cardinal-archbishop of Munich, and a senior Vatican office-holder before being elected Pope in 2005, whereas Georg, an accomplished musician, had to make do with becoming choirmaster of the ancient male voice choir of the cathedral in Regensburg, Bavaria.
Georg Ratzinger has something in common with the late Terry Major-Ball, elder brother of Sir John Major; for they both, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to their celebrated siblings, contrived at the same time to make them look faintly ridiculous. While Terry used media interviews to promote the prime minister’s image as that of an absurdly Pooterish English suburbanite, Georg sought by the same means to portray Joseph Ratzinger as too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Catholic Church. They also produced ghosted memoirs — Major Major and My Brother the Pope — that were decidedly ‘off-message’.
In My Brother the Pope, which was published only this year, Georg Ratzinger said that Joseph had never wanted to be pope and that when he was elected by the college of cardinals he had felt as though ‘the guillotine’ had fallen on him. But I was in St Peter’s Square in 2005 when the newly elected pope appeared on the balcony of the basilica to greet the crowd, and I have seldom seen anybody look more happy about anything.
Georg made much of the pope’s physical frailty and ill health, adding in a media interview this month that he thought he would cut back his foreign trips because they were wearing him out. Meanwhile, the Vatican spokesman was insisting that the Pope had returned from his recent trips to Mexico and Cuba ‘in fantastic condition’. Georg also chose somewhat gratuitously to point out that, while he and his brother both shared a love of music, the Pope wasn’t very serious about it and didn’t play the piano very well.
It is clear that Terry Major-Ball and Georg Ratzinger loved their younger brothers dearly and felt neither malice nor envy towards them; but they wanted to share the limelight they attracted and to parade an intimate knowledge of them that could be sharply at odds with the images promoted by their spin doctors. Elder brothers are important. The wrong kind can do you a lot of harm.
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