Long life | 21 April 2012

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.