Ed Miliband beat brother David to the Labour leadership by a narrow margin Headlines about an alleged feud between Ed and David Miliband are “damaging” Labour, Lord Falconer has said.
According to press reports the relationship between the two brothers is far worse than either has admitted.
Both men have dismissed the claims, made in a new book serialised by The Mail on Sunday, as “tittle tattle”.
But Lord Falconer told BBC News they were “distracting” and “highly reminiscent” of disagreements between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
“It is trying to fit the present and the future into a template from the past. There is no doubt that Gordon and Tony got on incredibly badly,” said the former Lord Chancellor.
“Everybody therefore wants that sort of rowing to continue and it’s got the added spice of the fact that the two leading figures in the Labour Party are brothers. But that’s not the way it is.”
The two brothers have both insisted their personal relations were not damaged by Ed’s defeat of elder sibling David in last year’s Labour leadership contest.
“This is soap opera speculation about history when the public want politicians to be focusing on the future”
David Miliband spokesman
The pair were on different sides in the feud between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair during Labour’s time in power – and have both acknowledged the damage that row did to the party and the need to avoid it happening again.
David has largely remained silent on policy issues since his defeat and avoided public criticism of Ed’s performance as leader.
But the newspapers have been dominated in recent days by leaked documents, including the speech David planned to make if he had won the leadership, in what has been seen by some commentators as a concerted attempt by David’s supporters to destabilise Ed’s leadership.
Shadow health secretary Jon Healey denied reports of in-fighting between rival camps.
“There is very little of that, I have to tell you, either in Parliament or around the country,” he told Sky News.
He said Labour was in a “unique position” for a party that had just lost an election as there was “a determination and a unity that we simply have not seen before”.
A new unauthorised biography, Ed: The Milibands And The Making Of A Labour Leader, claims David Miliband can barely bring himself to speak to his brother, and the two men communicate mainly through officials.
David is also said to be scathing about Ed’s performance in private, saying he is “heading in the wrong direction”.
Ed, for his part, is said to regard his sibling as too “managerial and technocratic”.
The book also claims there is “bad blood” between Ed and shadow chancellor Ed Balls, dating back to their time as advisers to Gordon Brown at the Treasury.
The biography, by Labour-supporting journalists Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, questions Ed’s claim he made a last-minute decision to stand and may have been plotting to eclipse David for years.
The book also claims Ed blames David’s team for spreading his nicknames Red Ed and Forrest Gump and that the two brothers have clashed over how Ed broke the news he was planning to stand.
A spokesman for ex-foreign secretary David said: “This is soap opera speculation about history when the public want politicians to be focusing on the future.”
A source close to the Labour leader said: “David and Ed talked before, during and after the leadership election.
“There is no problem. This is tittle tattle and the Labour Party will be concentrating on meeting the challenges of Britain’s future, not looking back to the past.”
Ed will try to regain the initiative on Monday, with a speech in which he will admit Labour got it wrong over the welfare state and banking regulation.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.