ShareThisThey are, depending on your perspective, either the Venus and Serena Williams or the Cain and Abel of British politics.
Brothers David Miliband, 44, and Ed Miliband, 40, have shared almost everything in life, including a dark, serious appearance that often causes them to be mistaken for one another. First, they were classmates at Oxford, then Labor Party activists and writers, then fellow members of Parliament, then senior cabinet ministers in Gordon Brown's government.
Only now, as these political celebrities are running against each other to replace Brown as leader of the Labor Party, is it becoming apparent to casual observers that there are actual differences between the Miliband boys.
Whether those prove to be complementary differences that turn them into a full-spectrum family team like the tennis-playing Williams sisters, or more profound ideological schisms that flare into a biblical sibling feud, is a fate to be determined between now and the hotly contested Labor contest in September.
Within the party, humbled by its defeat to David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats in the wake of the May 6 elections, and trying to find its footing on the opposition benches after 13 years in government, the Miliband showdown is proving to be a test of unity.
For aside from being the best-known figures in what is currently a four-way leadership race (MP Ed Balls, a close ally of Brown, is also seen as a strong contender), the Miliband brothers are considered ideal representatives of the party's two major discordant factions. The coming months will determine whether the space between those factions is a friendly divide or a dark chasm of mutually destructive hatred.
David Miliband was once considered the quintessential Blairite: As head of Blair's policy unit after the 1997 election, he drafted many of the core ideological messages of Blair's early prime ministerial career, and helped lead his project of making the Labor Party more open to the market economy and the middle-class aspirations of many Britons.
Ed Miliband, on the other hand, has always been seen as part of Gordon Brown's camp: He spent post-1997 next door to his brother, in the office of the chancellor of the exchequer at 11 Downing Street, working as a policy adviser and speechwriter for Brown, whose views were more traditionally social democratic and focused on equality.
It was during that period that the Labor government became increasingly divided into Blairite and Brownite factions, driven by the personal animosity between the two leaders, and forcing many MPs and bureaucrats to choose their loyalties between blocs who would barely talk to one another.
That history has led some party members to fear that the brothers will carry the feud into a second generation. John McDonnell, an MP who is running for Labor leadership on a far-left platform, denounced the brothers as "the sons of Blair and sons of Brown."
Indeed, after the fall of Blair (who resigned in 2007) and Brown (who stepped down as party leader last week), Labor is nervously waiting to see if the factional schism is a permanent fixture that will continue to poison the party's internal relations.
Many feel that the underlying policy disputes are negligible. "It's a fairly minor distinction between them, in the larger scheme of things, but to be frank, we really don't know how divided they and their followers are," said Sunder Katwala, head of the Fabian Society, the venerable social democratic group that spawned the Labor Party and has been more closely associated with Mr. Brown in recent years.
David Miliband launched his campaign this week by declaring that "the Blair-Brown era is over." He told a crowd, "I'm not interested in a future of politics that's debating whether you're a Brownite or a Blairite. ... We do not repeat their mantras or seek to bow down in front of the greats of the past."
Ed Miliband's message of unity, while similar in many ways, was different in one small but potentially very important respect. While his brother spoke of the Labor Party's past as something to forget, Ed described it as something to which supporters should return.
"We need to reconnect with the people that we lost," he told the BBC. This, some of the party's rank-and-file members suggested, was a hint that Labor should return to the far-left trade-union politics that had dominated its policies before the 1980s.
Those who know both brothers suggest that this polarization is an exaggeration, perhaps a deliberate one. David Miliband was always somewhat to the left of Tony Blair, and his brother is rooted in the same modern social democratic tradition that weds market economics to progressive social policy.
This is perhaps an inevitable evolution for the sons of Ralph Miliband, the great sociologist and left-wing political scholar, whose family of Polish Jews found their way to Britain in flight from the Holocaust.
More damaging than any ideological divide may be the roles played by the rival brothers in British politics. David Miliband is by far the more popular and well-known figure. As foreign secretary, he had a high profile, and as Labor's most articulate and natural speaker, he appeared frequently on television. He is unquestionably the public's choice to succeed Brown.
But Ed Miliband is a far larger figure within the party. He drafted Brown's 2010 election manifesto, a process that involved consulting the entire party membership.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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