A saga of sibling rivalry and Britain's political future

In popular television drama many male characters are mere ciphers, plodding through their careers while the women hog the limelight. The odd bad-boy criminal may drive the plot along, but the focus of the drama tends to be on the women's hyped-up jealousies. All this changes, however, when you have a pair of brothers. Sibling rivalry is the surest way to inject drama into the male character.

So it has been that Britain, where following politics is a minority sport, has been glued for months to the struggle between two brothers to lead the opposition Labour Party. The elder, David Miliband, former foreign secretary, was the favourite from the start. Clever, decisive and with a questing intelligence, he was seen as the heir to Tony Blair, a true prime minister-in-waiting. There was shock when his younger brother, Ed Miliband, entered the race to become party leader. Five years younger than David, he started as a rank outsider. He has spent his political life in his brother's shadow, introducing himself at parties as "the other Miliband". There were some whispers of treachery, but no one predicted any upset to the smooth coronation of David.

As the weeks ticked by Ed carved out territory in opposition to the legacy of Mr Blair, a divisive figure in Labour who is respected for winning three elections but despised for betraying the party's soul. Ed declared that the Iraq war was a mistake. He curried favour with the trade unions - a major part of the electorate for leader of the Labour Party - by calling for wage rises for workers and for squeezing the banks, earning the tag of "Red Ed".

The brothers come from a highly political family - their father was Marxist historian, and the big hitters of the British Left used to gather around their kitchen table when the boys were in short trousers. Their mother Marion is an active campaigner for human rights and a supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the group which sent a boat of Jewish activists to break the Gaza siege this week.

Neither brother could deliver a knockout blow in terms of image. David - stiff, rather too tightly buttoned and with an immovable helmet of close cropped hair - looks like a Lego man. Ed, more easy going, is portrayed as a panda, because of his dark rimmed eyes, though some see a resemblance to Borat. When the votes were counted on Saturday, to gasps of astonishment from the party faithful, the younger man pipped his elder brother by the slenderest of margins, winning 50.65 per cent of the votes. The new leader delivered his first speech with one strong message: a new generation had taken over. To some amateur psychologists, this emphasis on youth amounted to fratricide, the younger brother's payback for those humiliating years of following in the firstborn's wake.

It was then that some of the Labour old guard recalled that, in the boys' childhood, while David and the adults debated weighty matters of policy, young Ed used to slip away to watch Dallas, a TV saga of two brothers fighting for control of a Texas oil firm. Clearly he learned some useful tricks there. David has now decided to leave front line politics, on the grounds that the media would make endless "psychodrama" (Ed's phrase) and "soap opera" (David's term) from two brothers in the shadow cabinet. Every statement would be parsed for signs of a split, and every picture manipulated to show simmering jealousy.

Much regret has been expressed that a political talent has been lost to British politics, and there is a whiff of buyers' remorse in the party at the choice it has made. Did the trade unions choose the wrong brother because he went out of his way to cast himself as the anti-Blair candidate, a choice which David, having long served under Mr Blair, was denied? Critics of Ed portray him as a ditherer. They point to the fact that Ed has not yet found time to marry his live-in partner, the environmental lawyer Justine Thornton, even though they are expecting their second child.

In the past such a titbit would not have found a place in the pages of a newspaper like The National. It would have been seen as gossip, and none of the reader's business, though of course it would have chewed over with relish by those in the know, journalists and politicians. But, as Patrick Granfield discussed in these pages on Tuesday, there is no privacy in the era of Facebook. Several conclusions can be drawn from this saga of sibling rivalry. It attracted millions of otherwise indifferent people to take an interest in politics and to gain, as by-product, an idea of the policy debates. The psycho-dramatisation of politics may be lamentable, but it cannot be avoided now and has to be embraced. The downside is that it seems impossible, under the rules laid down by the media, for two ambitious brothers to serve in the same party.

In a more patriarchal society, such as in parts of the Middle East, the family would no doubt have shared out the roles by paternal diktat. Both could have prospered in the paths chosen for them. But we are all individuals in the West now, with all the benefits and drawbacks of that. It should not be a surprise that Ed won the race. The younger brother gained merit by having the courage to challenge the front-runner candidate. He gained even more merit by challenging his own brother. The voters are less impressed by candidates such as David who exuded a sense of entitlement to the top job. The art of politics is infected, whether the practitioners like it or not, with the spirit of the TV talent show.

What does Marion, the mother of the Miliband brothers, think? She does not say. But people who know her say that the politics of both boys are too centrist and bloodless for her tastes. So it is for the best that she keeps her views to herself. aphilps@thenational.ae