Ed Miliband: all about my father

“Funnily enough in the leadership campaign, David and I were asked independently what was our favourite film, and we both said 12 Angry Men. Because we both used to watch it with him.”

Every time 12 Angry Men came on television, Ralph would tune in. Half a dozen times, his young boys Ed and David took their pew on the sofa at home, next to Dad, to watch it with his same reverence. Henry Fonda plays a man on jury service. The other 11 jurors think the teenage boy on trial is guilty. Fonda disagrees. One by one, he turns the rest of the jury to his way of thinking. It’s a political film then?

“I hadn’t thought about it like that before. But definitely. That’s what my dad taught me. His story is not just about the indomitable power of the human spirit, which it is, and what young people can achieve if given a chance and they take it, which it is. But it’s also about the power of ideas to change things.

“It’s no coincidence that David and I both went into politics. That’s what he taught us. Not in a heavy-handed way, but just a sense that you have a responsibility to leave the world a better place, and everyone will do that in very different ways. That must be informed by his experience. If you go through what he did, and you’re the one that survived, you can’t help but think you have a responsibility. And you can’t fail to pass on that responsibility.”

Ed is, once again, having a bad week. Just days ago, he was annihilated on Radio 5 Live by disillusioned Labour supporters, over the last months he has been denounced by various dignitaries of the Left, it’s been a year of struggle in the polls, and somehow Ed’s victory over his brother David in the leadership contest gets no easier to bear for many Labour supporters. Psychologically difficult?

“It goes with the territory”.

Today he will give a speech at the Labour youth jobs conference in Warwick, dwelling on his father.

His office is packed with family photos, but there are just two on his desk. One of his sons, and a group shot of his family, with teenage Ed and David standing either side of Ralph, looking almost like twins. Ralph’s adult life was spent berating the Left for its slide to the Centre, yet despite producing books with the seriousness of The State in Capitalist Society, he was a convivial man, mates with everyone from Tony Benn to Joe Slovo. Ed, by the way, is the same mixture. His on-screen presence is so serious it’s stiff, a tendency well-noted by the British public. But in reflective mood he is quite different. Nice, and his jokes are easy, unguarded.

Yet Ralph’s legacy now is not so much in his work, but the fact that he survived at all. He was once a boy who literally outran the Nazis to arrive in London in 1940, motherless, without English, taking a job clearing rubble from the bombed-out East End. Three years later, he was at the London School of Economics. The story is silently shaping Labour Party politics, but is rarely told.

“I wonder if it’s like this for other Holocaust families, but it was only told in a limited way in our household, because it was such a painful thing.”

Ed’s grandparents knew the family were hours or days from capture. They were Jews in Brussels in 1940 as the Nazis were closing in. The family rushed to the train station, but they had already missed the last train to Paris. A hurried family conference was held. It was decided that Ralph, then 16, and his father would walk the 100km to the coast. They set off that night. His sister, four years younger, was deemed too young to make the trek, and so his mother stayed with her.

It was a kind of Sophie’s choice, and once parted — Ralph and his father caught one of the last boats from Ostend — the two sides of the family did not see each other for ten years. (After the war their reunification was complicated by paperwork). It must have been excruciating for Ralph, knowing that his mother and sister were left in extreme danger. He was miserable, Ed says, and arriving in the relative safety of London could give him no relief.

“My memory of it is that the men were being targeted, being rounded up. So that is why they had to make that decision. But yes. They would occasionally get messages transmitted to them in London, saying they were all right. But often they would be a few months late.”

What Ralph and his dad didn’t know was that Ed’s resourceful grandmother, talking her way out of detainment by the Gestapo, was lucky enough to make contact with one of her customers, just before being summoned to the camps.

“I don’t know if you know this, but the only reason my aunt and grandmother survived is because my grandmother sold hats in the market. One of her customers took them into this Belgian village, where they had to hide.”

If this story strikes you as something from a film or a novel, it is extraordinary that the same is also true, if not more so, for his mother’s side. Ed remembers being about 6, and seeing an old-fashioned photo of a man. It turned out to be his grandfather on his mother, Marion’s, side. He was murdered by the Nazis in Poland. Marion, through a series of brave kindnesses of strangers, survived.

“It was hard for me to compute, trying to understand it.”

When Ed was just 3, his father had a heart attack, and never really regained good health. Ed the boy knew family was fragile at every age.

“My theory is that if you have an older father, you tend not to be so rebellious.”

Because you don’t want to be an added strain?

“Yes.”

His father was often away, teaching a term a year at an American university. There was one “hilarious” four months when Ralph took the 12-year-old Ed with him to America, he enrolled at the local American school and ate his dad’s cold spaghetti every night.

But mostly his father’s absences were “very tough”, yet now his own life is repeating a little. Ed finds his absence from his two young sons, Daniel, whom they call Mr D, aged 2, and Samuel, a baby, now the hardest part of his job. So he does what his father did when he needed to reconnect with his children, he told them the story of two sheep called BooBoo and HeeHee.

Two sheep? I say it doesn’t sound like much to work with. Ed too had this reaction when he first gave the storytelling a go, so his mother, Marion, gave him one of his father’s manuscripts. It was quite a departure from Ralph’s normal work, a few pages of a BooBoo and HeeHee children’s book that Ralph had been toying with publishing. Now Ed is up and running. Last night, his elder son was in a bad mood as Ed hadn’t been home for bedtime for a week. A story about the sheep helped, but really, balancing a home and two working parents, “it’s bloody hard”.

They are a year into married life. Does marriage feel different? He instinctively starts fiddling with his wedding ring as he answers. “I’m very happy to be married. I loved the day. But it doesn’t feel different. I don’t feel more committed, I felt very committed and in love with Justine before.”

Over time, Ed’s father’s health worsened. Ed had followed his brother’s path to read PPE at Oxford, and while there his dad had a debilitating heart operation. Ed found being away from him gruelling. He was then 21, and not sure of his way in the world. At the age of 24, his father died. This is when Ed’s shoulders slump. “It was the worst thing that happened in my life.”

“He was a lodestar. Something to steer by. This is the kind of thing I mean. I remember having a really fundamental conversation with him, must have been a year or so before he died. I said, ‘look Dad, I know you’d quite like me to be an academic’. And he said, ‘but that’s not what drives you, is it?’ I said, ‘no, that’s not what drives me’. He said, ‘what drives you is politics, and changing things, the here and now’.”

What would your dad seem like, if he walked in the room right now? “He’d have presence. Seriousness. A passion about the world.”

What advice would he give you?

“To stick to your principles.”

But you can’t take that advice, can you? “Politics involves compromise, but you can’t be in it if you abandon your principles. You’ve got to implement them in a way that will be successful. I think he would be totally amazed, he wouldn’t believe any of this . . .” Ed breaks off to gesture around the room.

“The idea that two of his children would be MPs and me the leader, that would not have been what he would have expected.”

It strikes me, looking back at Ralph’s story, that there is another faint echo there. Ralph’s siblings were split, he would have known the guilt and luck in being the chosen one. Ed has battled two Davids in his life, Cameron and his brother. Of the two, his relationship with Cameron is probably the most straightforward. What would Ralph have thought about what happened between you and David?

“I don’t know really. I have thought about it. I think he would think what any parent would think, it’s difficult. But both of my children have to do what they think is the right thing to do.”

Have you ever apologised to David?

“No. Because this is a conversation both of us had before we embarked on the leadership campaign. Both of us thought it would be wrong for the other one to stand in the way. The pledge we made going into that contest, was to say this has got to be done in a way that we don’t spend our time slagging each other off. Because that’s not what we do, privately or publicly. And we didn’t.”

Ed says that now, nearly a year and a half on from the leadership contest, “we’ve sort of moved on”.

The last time he remembers the families all getting together was just before Christmas. By that, I take it to mean David, now living in the Primrose Hill home the brothers grew up in, is not quite ready to invite Ed to snuggle down on the sofa together to watch 12 Angry Men, for old time’s sake. Give it time, because it occurs to me it’s not just a film about the power of democracy to deliver justice for the little guy. It’s also, in a way, a parable of being Leader of the Opposition. Just what did your father love about it?

“It’s that amazing feeling of, one person against 11. He’s standing out against the crowd. For the right thing.”