Let us ignore the quips that are being made this week in the better pubs in the U.K. about Fidel and Raùl and concentrate on the brothers David and Ed Miliband, who will be fighting each other in the coming months to succeed Gordon Brown. David, born 1965, the former Foreign Secretary, launched his campaign in his South Shields constituency on Monday. It is not clear when Ed, born 1969, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Gordon Brown cabinet, will throw his hat in the ring.
No doubt there will be other candidates.
“This will be a civilized contest,” said Ed. “David is my best friend in the world. I love him dearly. There is no way I’m going to take lumps out of him either on the record, off-the-record or behind the scenes. It is not my way of doing politics.”
A columnist for The Guardian wrote: “David is first and foremost a politician of government, whereas Ed is before anything else a Labour party person. David masters briefs, makes quick decisions and cuts deals in a way that has won him many ministerial advisers. Ed has done plenty of important work in government, too, but has also devoted more time to wonkish political theorising and also to striking up a rapport with the constituency parties and the unions. Under Labour’s electoral college election system, where individual members and trade unionists count, that could just give him the edge.”
And how will the public respond to the contest between two brothers?
It’s hard to think of a precedent in English – or, for that matter, any politics.
Labour sympathizers are afraid that a leadership campaign dominated by a couple of brothers who look and sound strikingly similar will forfeit Labour’s potential advantage in taking on the Downing Street team already being labelled TweedleClegg and TweedleCam. It may – or may not – do them harm because it suggests a narrowing of the political class.
The human interest in watching the battle will be tremendous, especially for those who remember their father, the Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband (1924–1994), who wrote a number of important books and taught at the London School of Economics, and at Canadian and American universities. It will also be of considerable interest to their mother, Marion, whom Ralph Miliband married in 1961 and who in 2004 was described in a Guardian article, under the caption “The House of the Rising Sons,” as “a woman with questioning eyes and disobedient hair.”
Ralph Miliband was born in Brussels of Polish-Jewish émigré parents. At the age of sixteen he and his father were forced to flee as Hitler’s army invaded Belgium. They managed to catch a boat for London at Ostend and entered the U.K. illegally on forged papers.
He is buried in Highgate Cemetery close to Karl Marx.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
“Let us ignore the quips that are being made this week in the better pubs in the U.K. about Fidel and Raùl…” — no, no! let us have the gossip! Some of us are nowhere near ‘the better pubs in the U.K.’
Sorry, no gossip. I thought you were going to remind me of the two Polish brothers who were in office at the same time, and they were twins, I believe. I would have replied: But they didn’t run against each other!