Just because he's more shiny

Some people say that the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) is hideously middle-class, the realm of pushy well-off parents who would rather pay for their antenatal classes than mix with the riff-raff on the free NHS courses and have no interest in the pursuits of the common man.

Nonsense. Why you can't get more in touch with the masses than the gathering of men from my NCT antenatal class on Saturday afternoon. There we stood at 4.30pm on the touchline of the rugby club, a thoroughly proletariat gathering of doctors, lawyers, bankers, academics and journalists, all checking our iPhones for news of the Labour leadership contest.

So shocking was the result that it quite put us off discussing house-prices, the cost of nannies and other topics of working-class discourse. Ed Miliband? Mili Minor? But he's only about 17. Even the socialist in our group (who lives in a nicer street than the rest of us, naturally) was aghast.

If we were shocked, David Miliband must have been thoroughly walloped by the news. Still, at least he's got a first from Oxford, which is what my wife always tells me when I beat her at Scrabble.

Marbury has a rather nice piece imagining the conversation that David might have had on Sunday with that great love of his life, Hillary Clinton:

Madam Secretary, we have David Miliband on the line

HC: David! How are you?

DM: OK, how can I explain this. You remember 2008?

HC: Do I remember it? You mean, do I remember the year in which I finally applied for the job I'd spent my whole life preparing for; the job for which I'd sacrificed so much, for which I'd slogged and scraped and sweated and self-erased; the job which was mine, which everyone said was going to be mine, because the way was clear now, the time was right; the job for which I felt readier than I'd ever felt for anything? Only for some young guy with next-to-no experience, this guy who seems like he's fresh out of school, who talks nice and tells everyone in the party what they want to hear and who opposed the Iraq war when he had nothing at stake - well I mean whoopy-doo, if I'd been a nobody at the time I might have been against it - this guy, who the media wet themselves over because he's so pretty and empathetic and wow, isn't he shiny - this guy saunters up and rips it out of my hands? Out of my fucking hands? Yes, I remember 2008, David. Why?

DM: Same thing happened to me. But that guy? My kid brother.

HC: Ooooooh. That's bad. That's really bad