Just back from a week in Cornwall, Ed Miliband seems relaxed and confident as he perches on a window seat in his Westminster office, with a view on to the Thames. He knows he has many disparagers – both from among the supporters of his main rival for the Labour leadership, his elder brother, David Miliband, and from the professional commentariat, who caricature him as an unreconstructed Brownite statist with limited appeal to the wider electorate, especially in England. “I don’t think we can just recycle New Labour solutions,” he says, when we put some of this to him. “I think we’ve got to realise that we are not going to win the next election with the old formulas and I don’t think a political party can succeed if departures from perceived orthodoxy end up being seen as ‘Old Labour’ and not part of the debate.”
We meet Miliband on the day Lord Myners, the former banker and City minister under Gordon Brown, has used a newspaper interview to criticise the candidate’s position on progressive taxation as “wrong” and suggest that he has moved away from the “classic centre left”, from which elections are won.
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