Why David Miliband is Mr White As the Everton footballer Phil Neville tweeted when his commentator brother, Gary, used his full name on air: "I'm your brother! R kid [sic], Phil, my brother, Fizzer - anyone of those, but Phil Neville?? You can see why Mr Miliband needed to pay lip service to the existence of his brother's leadership though. In July 2008, he wrote a similar piece, this time for the Guardian, in which he failed to mention at all the name of the sitting prime minister, Gordon Brown, who at the time was going through one of his sticky patches in the polls. Rather than contradict the immediate conclusion drawn by everyone who read that he was after the job for himself, Mr Miliband blushed and giggled his way through the summer, never quite denying he would challenge his leader, but never doing so either. At one point he laughed uproariously when a caller to a daytime radio show suggested she would prefer him as prime minister. "Is that my mother on the line," he quipped, hilariously. The following month, when the Telegraph obtained details of the appointments he planned to make to his first cabinet, he again bottled it, denying the story outright. Asked why, his advisers explained: "David had not realised quite how big the story would be." It is now clear from reading the books published about the period by Alistair Darling and others that Mr Miliband had been agonising for virtually the duration of Mr Brown's time in office about whether or not to challenge him. Indeed, in 2009, his close friend James Purnell went so far as to resign from the Cabinet, after being assured that Mr Miliband was finally ready to wield the knife. When it came down to it, though, the older Miliband wanted to win the leadership without spilling blood. He waited until defeat at the polls saw off Mr Brown, and was fully expecting victory in the leadership election that followed. It was a hard lesson when his younger, leftier, more union-friendly brother won the crown that may well have been his had he fought for it, and one he seems yet to have fully accepted. Sometimes in politics you have to bite.