Steerpike at Labour: No such thing as a free glass of wine

David Miliband blasted New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hasan’s updated Ed Miliband biography yesterday afternoon: ‘Judging by extracts about me in the Mail on Sunday, updates to Ed’s biography should be filed in the fiction section’. The former foreign secretary took umbrage at the suggestion that he had said his brother would ‘crash and burn’. And, just in case we had missed the point, he added ‘i.e. made up’ for good measure.

Despite these manifold grievances, the elder Miliband graced the New Statesman’s Labour conference party later in the evening. He waited until Ed had done the rounds and left before entering, tieless. Given that David has pulled in over half a million pounds in outside interests in 15 months, you might have thought that he could have gone without a free glass of wine.