Justine Thornton, Ed Miliband’s wife, has revealed that she fears the campaign against her husband will get “really vicious” in the run-up to polling day.
Asked how she dealt with personal attacks on her husband, she told the BBC: “I think it’s going to get worse. I think over the next couple of months it’s going to get really vicious, really personal, but I’m totally up for this fight.”
She added: “I think this goes way beyond Ed as an individual. I think it’s about whether decencies and principle count for something in political life.”
Mr Miliband insisted that he did not care what people said about him. “You know what I think people underestimate about me? That I’m much more resilient than they thought,” he said. “People have underestimated me in the past. Let’s see what the result of this election is.”
Ms Thornton, a barrister specialising in environmental law, married the Labour leader in 2011 after six years together. She has rarely given interviews but a senior Labour source said she would “play her part” in the election campaign, adding that her remarks were a “clear reference to the kind of campaign that the Tories want to fight”.
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Ms Thornton said that Mr Miliband’s biggest regret about the demands of leading his party was “not seeing the children enough”.
The couple have two sons, Samuel, four, and Daniel, five. To help them understand their father’s job, Ms Thornton said that the pair had taken to describing the role as head of “the red team”. She said: “There’s quite a lot of chats about what the red team’s doing and who the red team’s helping.”
Ms Thornton said that she had not had time to consider how the pressure on her family would increase if her husband became prime minister. “Probably like most women, being a working mother, and having a husband who’s Ed, I’m definitely on a kind of 48-hour timetable so I haven’t really thought about it.” Asked whether they discussed politics together, she said that they spoke about “things that happen to crop up”.