BBC News profiles the candidates: Ed Miliband

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

In the penultimate profile of the five leadership candidates, Ed Miliband has today told the BBC how it feels “odd” to stand against his brother and reacts to criticism that he has tacked to the left.

Miliband admitted “some members of the cabinet did have doubts” about whether Gordon Brown should have been leader, but said that he was one of the ‘least tribal’ people in New Labour.

Ed recalls how when working for Brown he was known by the Number 10 team as the “emissary from a different planet”, someone who could communicate between Blairite and Brownite factions rather than “a briefer” who sought to undermine Tony Blair. However, Miliband reveals that the Brown team believed that there was a deal in place between Blair and Brown in 2004, that the former would stand down for the latter.

On tacking to the left, Ed said:

“You don’t need to be left wing to think that people need a decent amount of money for going to work, you don’t need to be left wing to think that some of the excesses in the banks are something we should do something about and not simply signal that they can carry on; this is where I have a problem with some of what New Labour did, because we got stuck in our own orthodoxies and dogmas. We hadn’t realised that the world had changed, that actually we’d proved ourselves as being a party that didn’t want to abolish capitalism, but people were expecting more from us, people were expecting us to speak up and say there are some excesses at the top we need to do something about it. “

And responding to questions about why he’s standing, Miliband replied:

“When you lose an election you can either conclude that the show was great and the audience was poor, or you can say actually we’re going to face up to where we went wrong. Some of the issues around the economy, the response on the banking crisis, some of the issues around tuition fees on whether people can really get on – I proposed a graduate tax – some foreign policy mistakes, in my view like Iraq.”

The video of the interview can be seen here, or you can click on the picture below: