Sorry for the delay – have been writing for the main ft.com site, where we have written about the victory of Ed Miliband over David Miliband by the thinnest of margins.
The headline victory is astonishingly close, 50.65 per cent to 49.35 per cent.
More worrying for Ed’s team, as they snap open the champagne bottles (or ale, or whatever “New” New Labour drinks) is that he only beat his brother in one of three categories; the unions.
For unions and affiliates he picked up 19.9 per cent against 13.4 per cent for David. But David won by 17.8 per cent to 15.5 per cent for MPs and 18.1 per cent to 15.2 per cent for ordinary members.
That makes Ed an obvious target for those – the Tories, obviously – who want to portray him as “captured” by the union movement. The Ed team had been briefing this week that they thought they had won a majority of the ordinary members; it’s rather bad news for them that they did not.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey