UK: Impact of Miliband brothers split still felt by Labour

They were two young, very talented brothers with the world to play for. The older one was poised to become leader of Britain's Labour Party, with a chance to become prime minister, the other was expected to rise with his brother to the highest ranks of the country's fever-pitched political arena.
But things didn't go this way for David and Ed Miliband in 2010. Ed didn't want to take a back seat to his more polished and articulate older brother and shocked the political world by challenging David for the leadership role and triumphing or so it seemed.
Five years later, that victory has turned bitter.

Ed's Downing Street dreams have been dashed by his party's dismal failure in Thursday's election, which saw Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives score a convincing victory over a weakened Labour Party.
The Miliband family has suffered as well: A gulf as wide as the Atlantic Ocean has opened between the once-close brothers, with David, 49, abandoning politics and moving to self-imposed exile in New York. That has left the brothers' 80-year-old mother, a Holocaust survivor, trying to bridge the gap.
John Rentoul, author of a biography about former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and columnist at the Independent on Sunday, believes the leadership contest has split the brothers, perhaps forever.

"They have to maintain a good face in public," he said. "But I don't think their relationship is easy. I do not see how David could ever forgive his brother for what he did."

Yet, the last few days have seen rumblings that David might return to Britain to jumpstart his career and try once more to become party leader now that Ed, 45, has resigned the post. The prospect was fuelled by the Twitter musings of one of Labour's best known and most wealthy donors, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who admitted she was obsessing about David.
The obsession goes like this: Ed, for all his earnestness, proved a dismal campaigner, and many believe David would have been far more formidable. Some Labour supporters suffer from "what might have been" syndrome, a regretful sense that the party, heavily influenced by unions during the leadership contest, picked the wrong brother.

Rentoul says he believes David would probably have had the political skills to win Thursday's election, in part by following Blair's "New Labour" strategy of positioning the party at the political center.