A Miliband Too Many
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
LONDON — The first murder was of course a fratricide. We’re not there yet. But the tale of the two clean-cut super-achieving Jewish boys from North London who got in a fight has riveted a nation with a taste for a good brawl.
Cain and Abel were just the beginning. We’ve had Romulus and Remus and “The Brothers Karamazov,” even if — this being a soccer-playing nation — we’ve been spared Peyton and Eli Manning. The British press has been digging deep into the psychodrama of the dueling Milibands, sons of refugees from Nazi and Communist Europe.
Yes, Britain is an open society of long date, but more open still since the Blair years, a fact lurking in the background of the Miliband saga, but worthy of note in a Europe of creeping bigotry and in a nation strangely bent on blackening the considerable legacy of a great Labour prime minister.
A chapter for the Milibands is now closed. Narrowly beaten by his younger brother Ed Miliband, aka “Red Ed,” for the leadership of the opposition Labour Party, David Miliband, aka “Brains,” has quit frontline politics. He rejected a spot in the shadow cabinet “because of the simple fact that Ed is my brother who has just defeated me for the leadership.”
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — The first murder was of course a fratricide. We’re not there yet. But the tale of the two clean-cut super-achieving Jewish boys from North London who got in a fight has riveted a nation with a taste for a good brawl.
Cain and Abel were just the beginning. We’ve had Romulus and Remus and “The Brothers Karamazov,” even if — this being a soccer-playing nation — we’ve been spared Peyton and Eli Manning. The British press has been digging deep into the psychodrama of the dueling Milibands, sons of refugees from Nazi and Communist Europe.
Yes, Britain is an open society of long date, but more open still since the Blair years, a fact lurking in the background of the Miliband saga, but worthy of note in a Europe of creeping bigotry and in a nation strangely bent on blackening the considerable legacy of a great Labour prime minister.
A chapter for the Milibands is now closed. Narrowly beaten by his younger brother Ed Miliband, aka “Red Ed,” for the leadership of the opposition Labour Party, David Miliband, aka “Brains,” has quit frontline politics. He rejected a spot in the shadow cabinet “because of the simple fact that Ed is my brother who has just defeated me for the leadership.”
(More here.)
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