The World

David Miliband gave a dignified speech at the Labour Party conference today, in which he didn’t cry once. But I wish Ed Miliband, the new Labour leader, would stop emphasising how much he “loves” the brother whose career he has just destroyed. It’s all very schmalzy and unBritish.

On the other hand, if Ed insists on taking this line, he should really go for it in tomorrow’s leader’s speech. Here is a suggested line – “I love David. I adore him. (Dramatic pause). But that is why I had to destroy him. (Thumps lectern, tear trickles down his cheek). I hope you understand.”Meanwhile if Ed really is getting a taste for putting family ties under maximum political strain, the obvious next move is to offer the shadow chancellor job to Yvette Cooper, who is married to the much more obviously-qualified Ed Balls. That should make for some lively breakfasts in the Balls-Cooper household.

After that, the new Labour leader should have a quiet meeting with another ambitious younger brother, Jo Johnson, the newly elected Tory MP and brother of Boris, the mayor of London. For all Boris’s protestations that he is more likely to be decapitated by a frisbee than to become prime minister, he is a deeply ambitious man and is already planning how he can take over from David Cameron (shoving that smoothie, George Osborne, into the gutter, as he goes.) But as David Miliband’s experience shows, the best laid plans….Certainly, if I was Boris, I would be looking at brother Jo with a certain wariness, from now on.

As for David Miliband – it really must be an appalling come-uppance. He has always been the senior partner in the relationship. He is four years older than Ed. He studied PPE at Corpus Christi College and got a first. Ed trailed along to the same college four years later, and got a 2:1. David was head of policy for the prime minister, Tony Blair. Ed had a rather less glamorous job working at the Treasury for Gordon Brown. David got into the cabinet first and held one of the great offices of state, foreign secretary. Ed had the much less glamorous job of energy secretary. And yet it is now Ed who is party leader, and prime-minister-in-waiting.

David must be asking how the hell did that happen? And yet, Labour seems to have followed the temp-plate of both the Lib Dem and Conservative leadership elections. Both demonstrated that the ideal leadership candidate is young, good-looking and a relative blank-slate without too much of a record to shoot at. Neither Nick Clegg nor David Cameron had been in parliament for very long, or had ever hold office. Maybe Miliband D just had too much of a record – and, specifically, was too closely associated with Blairism.

That, of course, does not solve the moral conundrum about whether Ed was right to squish his elder brother’s career. Personally, I can’t get too worked up about it. There are worse tragedies in the world than the thwarted ambition of David Miliband. And there is no reason why Ed should have accepted being junior partner forever, simply because of an accident of birth order. Still, he’s certainly shown that he is ruthless. But, as colleagues at the FT pointed out today, while all good leaders are ruthless, not all ruthless people are good leaders.