The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business.
If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.
Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two careers and a family life. That Balls and Cooper have managed this as two of the most prominent politicians in the country has been one of the marvels of the modern political world.
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