People or Props? Now Miliband brings his family into the Labour leadership race

Daily Mail 27th September 2008

David Miliband has stepped up his campaign to become Labour leader by speaking movingly about his young children to men’s magazine GQ.

The Foreign Secretary revealed how one Monday morning his three-year-old son Isaac pleaded with him not to leave the family home in South Shields to travel to London.

‘Daddy stay! Daddy stay!’ Isaac implored him, when he saw his father getting ready to go. ‘Give Daddy a kiss goodbye,’ said Mr Miliband, but the little boy replied: ‘No. Daddy stay, Daddy stay.’

The Foreign Secretary, 43, told GQ that he had to tear himself away to leave.

Props? David Miliband with wife Louise

But the tactic of giving such interviews flies in the face of Gordon Brown’s scathing attack last week on politicians who use their family to advance their career.

In a withering jibe aimed at Tory leader David Cameron, who is regularly photographed with his three young children, Mr Brown told the Labour conference that politicians who let their children be photographed for newspapers were treating them as props, not people.

Mr Cameron rejected the jibe yesterday, saying that, as he was asking the public to do a ‘massive thing’ by making him Prime Minister, ‘they need to know a little bit about you, what makes you tick’ – and that included his family.

Mr Miliband’s comments in GQ are the latest in a series of interventions by the Foreign Secretary designed to raise his profile.

Only last weekend, he ended his reluctance to talk about Isaac and his other son, Jacob, who is approaching his first birthday, by saying he would throw himself in front of a train for them.

In the past he has complained to the Press Complaints Commission to stifle reports on the two boys, who were adopted by Mr Miliband and his musician wife Louise after they realised they could not have children.

Mr Miliband is still the preferred candidate for Blairite Labour MPs, despite a disastrous Labour conference where he was overheard saying he had downplayed his speech to avoid a ‘Heseltine moment’ – a reference to former Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Heseltine’s major role in bringing down Margaret Thatcher but never inheriting her crown.

And in his speech, Mr Brown took a thinly disguised swipe at Mr Miliband by telling delegates that the economic crisis meant this was ‘no time for a novice’.

The November issue of GQ is on sale from Thursday.