In the house of the rising sons part one

The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Saturday March 6 2004

Yet now and again, Saville receives an unlikely visitor. "David's dropped in on his way to his constituency a couple of times," says Saville casually, sitting in his study with a polemic, On The Mass Bombing Of Iraq, resting against his chair. "David" is David Miliband: Blair's head of policy from 1994 until 2001, now an MP, school standards minister and, according to plenty of political forecasters, a possible future prime minister.

Miliband is 38, almost half a century younger than Saville, and, on the surface at least, a more orthodox New Labour figure would be hard to imagine. For his increasingly frequent media appearances, Miliband favours pinstriped suits, American-sized smiles and fluent Blairite jargon. Saville wears cardigans. It is impossible not to wonder what they talk about. "I do not, in fact, quiz David about his politics," says Saville. He gives an intriguing explanation for this unexpected restraint towards a New Labour politician: he considers himself "a close member of the Miliband family".

Behind this remark lies a whole lost continent of political history. From the early 1960s until the early 90s, working from the same overflowing study in which he sits now, Saville edited one of the foremost English language journals of the international left, the Socialist Register. His more famous fellow editor was David Miliband's father.

Ralph Miliband died in 1994 as arguably Britain's most charismatic and influential leftwing intellectual. His books about the unequal relationship between business and politicians, and in particular about the tendency of the Labour party, and parties like it, to overcompromise with capitalism have been taught in universities in Britain and far beyond since the 1960s. His teaching is vividly remembered by former students. Outside academia, he also spent countless dogged hours as an activist, trying to establish more genuinely socialist alternatives to the Labour way of doing things. He did not soften with age. "The last conversation I had with Ralph," says a close friend, "he was savage about Blair."

It is occasionally noted as a minor political irony that a figure such as Ralph Miliband should be the father of one of Blair's most valued lieutenants - and also of one of Gordon Brown's: this month, David's equally precocious brother Ed, who is 34, started work as chairman of the Treasury's council of economic advisers. That the two brothers have ended up on opposite sides of the Blair-Brown divide has also been of intermittent interest to political diarists. But Ed and David, practitioners of a more wary politics than their father, almost never speak publicly about him. They declined to be quoted for this article. Some friends of the family also required an unusual degree of reassurance before agreeing to be interviewed. "Ralph" is still a large, challenging presence in certain political circles, a symbol of how the left used to be - and of what his sons and their New Labour colleagues have reacted against.

Ralph Miliband was born Adolphe Miliband in Brussels in 1924. His parents were Polish Jews who had migrated to Belgium. Ralph's father was a leather worker. His mother had ambitions for her family to join the middle class, but she had to supplement their income by selling hats at markets. The Milibands quickly learned to navigate Belgian society, with its old undertows of prejudice against Jews and eastern Europeans and, by the 1930s, its upwelling of enthusiasm for fascism. At the age of 12, on a family holiday in the country, Ralph found himself arguing with local farmers who were supporters of the far right. He began to follow politics. When a friend joined a leftwing Zionist group, Ralph followed.

At first, though, there was less urgency about his political commitment than might be assumed in retrospect. Brussels was not Berlin, and Ralph was doing distractingly well at school. "I discovered the Communist Manifesto," his biography quotes him writing later, but "not in any blindingly strong way."

Yet, in May 1940, the ominous world situation he enjoyed discussing with his fellow teenage activists became an indisputable reality. On the 10th, the Germans invaded Belgium. By the 16th, they had almost reached Brussels. The Milibands packed and hurried to one of the city's stations, intending to get to Paris (most of France had not yet fallen) and take refuge with relatives there. But the station was in chaos: the Germans had cut off the Brussels-Paris railway line. After lingering at the station into the evening, the Milibands gave up and went home. Back in their flat, Ralph heard a radio announcement that all boys of his age - he was now 16 - were to be conscripted into the Belgian army, currently being shot to pieces a few miles away. This was not his idea of useful political sacrifice; he decided he would walk to France. After a frantic family debate, the plan was amended: Ralph and his father would walk to the Channel instead, a distance of more than 60 miles, while the rest of the family stayed in Brussels and looked for another way out.

For the next two days and nights, Ralph and his father walked west through the flat countryside. At Ostend, they talked their way on to the last boat to England. Once they were at sea, they asked for refugee status. It was granted. The ship docked at Dover. From there they travelled to London.

They looked an odd pair: Ralph messy and gangling, towering over his father, both of them with great swept-back waves of black hair. Ralph had to change his name from the inadvertently provocative Adolphe. London was full of similar exiles, and he and his father managed to secure a living of sorts, clearing furniture from bombed houses. Driving around the capital with other labourers, looking at everything with the quick eyes of a new arrival, Ralph acquired a sense of England and its underlying structures: "We found out about middle-class meanness and snobbery ... about the curious combination of kindness, cunning, ignorance, feigned servility and actual contempt which the unskilled worker class had for their masters." The poverty of the East End roused him to fury - "It is the shame of their civilisation, the permanent condemnation of their system" - while, in the West End after an air raid, he wrote in his diary, "You feel in these ruins a wealth which hasn't gone, which will begin again tomorrow, and for which this bombing is not a major crisis."

One boiling afternoon during his first summer in London, he went to Highgate cemetery, found Karl Marx's grave and, standing with his fist clenched, swore "my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers' cause". Not that he intended to remain a worker himself: he found clearing bombsites "an arduous business" and felt a distance from his fellow labourers that was partly a matter of nationality but also a matter of aspirations. He wanted to be an intellectual. In 1941, he applied to study politics at the London School of Economics. He was accepted.

The LSE had temporarily moved to Cambridge to escape the bombing. For the next two years, Ralph relished the cloisters and the quiet, worked closely with the local Communist party without actually joining, and developed a distinctive arguing style - politically committed but carefully factual. "A grand lad - one of the best I have had in years," wrote the famous socialist professor Harold Laski, who became a mentor. From Laski, Miliband learned about the tensions between capitalism and democracy, and that socialists should value civil liberties. His other, later influence was the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills, who passed on to him an interest in "the Power Elite", the small number of interconnected individuals who tend to dominate capitalist democracies.

Miliband's thinking was also influenced by his family's continuing dramas. In 1942, Ralph's mother was detained in Brussels by the Gestapo and asked why her son and husband had fled to England and what they were doing there. She bluffed and was released, only to receive an order to report for deportation to the camps. She and the other Brussels Milibands said good bye to their neighbours, closed up their flat and disappeared into the countryside. They went to a village where they knew people and hid there for the rest of the occupation.

Ralph and his father received only occasional news about this. The British authorities were not particularly sympathetic and, after Belgium was liberated in 1944, it took almost a year for the family to be reunited. At one point in early 1945, Ralph, who had joined the Royal Navy two years earlier and fought at D-day and in the Mediterranean, was stationed off the Belgian coast but not allowed shore leave to join his family. Once the war was over, his father was initially refused permission to stay in Britain. Later, when Ralph wrote scathingly about the British state, his criticisms had the bite of personal experience.

Ralph Miliband spent his late 20s and early 30s back in London, making himself into a professional academic at the LSE. He temporarily put his political faith in the left of the Labour party, joining in 1951 and staying a member, as he later bashfully put it, "for a few years". But a more radical political movement gradually drew him away. The British New Left, like its counterparts in other wealthy democracies, was a loose but ambitious grouping of former communists, socialist academics and activists, who had turned against both the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and the caution of the Labour party in favour of a more free-ranging leftwing politics, concerned not just with the usual causes of class and poverty, but with nuclear weapons and popular culture and anti-imperial struggles worldwide.

The people who wrote the movement's journals and controlled its meetings were, or would soon become, formidable figures in modern British thought: the historian EP Thompson, the critic Raymond Williams, the sociologist Stuart Hall. Miliband's background made him slightly different - "He had a voice that came from outside," says Hall - but he was not intimidated. In fact, he was intimidating: "He had read all these things you hadn't," says one of the early editors of New Left Review. "You didn't want to have an argument with Ralph."

In 1957, Saville, who was editing the New Reasoner, another of the movement's journals, wrote to Miliband and asked him to contribute. When they met, Saville recalls, "I took to him straight away. He had this ability to speak lucidly and straightforwardly, and he was a good listener." In 1964, Saville and Miliband set up the Socialist Register. It quickly became an institution. It was well written, relatively undogmatic, and international in its interests, with ambivalent articles about Chairman Mao and Colonel Nasser next to cool scrutiny of American cold war propaganda. Prominent leftwing academics from around the world agreed to contribute.

"In the early 1960s, Ralph was becoming increasingly confident," says Saville. In 1961, Ralph had published his first book, Parliamentary Socialism. Densely researched and elegantly written, in long, uncoiling sentences that released sudden bolts of polemical venom, it was a demolition of the record of the Labour party in government. "The sickness of Labourism," Miliband wrote, in a phrase that would become as well known as the book, was a readiness to strike deals with the British establishment rather than reduce its powers or give serious consideration to less privileged interest groups. Given this tendency, he went on, "There is at least logic in the demands [of the Labour right] for the party's retreat to a suitably contemporary version of Liberalism." Three decades later, with Miliband's sons playing their part, New Labour would make this insight more prophetic than he might have wished.

A similar doomy fierceness made his lectures at the LSE during the 1960s into word-of-mouth events. In 1967, Leo Panitch, who today edits the Socialist Register, was a bored would-be lawyer from Canada with vague leftwing sympathies. Then, he remembers, "Another Canadian student said, 'You must come and hear these lectures by this remarkable man Miliband.' "

In the LSE's scuffed and functional lecture halls, he stood very straight on stage and spoke with booming conviction and a hint of a Belgian accent. "There was an element of performance equivalent to watching Tony Benn in the Commons," says Panitch. "My life was changed." He became a PhD student of Miliband's and saw a different side to him. "He was very loose and warm. I would go to his office and he would say, 'Let's get out of here' and we would go down to the Strand to a coffee shop." To Panitch, who was also Jewish, Miliband exposed a part of himself that he did not display to his usual, generally secular, leftwing circle: they would sometimes chat in Yiddish.

In other ways, too, Miliband's life was less austere than his public persona suggested. In 1961, he had married Marion Kozak, a woman in her mid-20s with questioning eyes and disobedient hair who had been one of his students years earlier. Her background and politics were similar to his, and she had a comparable, though less high-profile, career as an activist and academic. Yet she was more outgoing and had broader interests. In 1965, they had a son and bought a house - in Primrose Hill, north London, then a considerably less grand area than it is now.

David was only a few weeks old when they moved in, but Marion quickly filled the house with visitors: relatives and fellow leftwing writers, dissidents and academics from abroad, the occasional politician - all of them arguing around the basement dining table or on the narrow stairs at parties. As soon as David and Ed (who was born in 1969) were old enough, they were encouraged to join in. "Sometimes they would just sit there wide-eyed," says Panitch. "Sometimes they would say something funny, or ask a probing question." There was no question of discussions being watered down for the younger Milibands' benefit. "You couldn't not be interested in politics in that household," says Panitch.

One afternoon while David was still a schoolboy, he was at home studying when the doorbell rang. No one else was in, so he answered it, to find Joe Slovo, head of the military wing of the African National Congress, then engaged in armed actions against the South African government. For the next 45 minutes, David sat nervously in the kitchen while Slovo drank a glass of water, engaging him in conversation about how his work was going.

In the less dramatic, more fragmented, world of British leftwing politics, the Milibands' allegiances would not always be so simple and instinctive. By the end of the 1960s, the New Left had splintered into factions, partly under the pressure of events and partly because of its failure to replace more mainstream ideologies. Meanwhile, a newer politics had appeared that did not always fit with Ralph's Marx-influenced, all-encompassing way of looking at the world.

At the LSE, when confrontation famously flared between student activists and the university authorities, he was sympathetic to the former but anxious. For all the excitement of the jostling and sit-ins in the LSE's cramped hallways and courtyards, Panitch, who was "involved" on the student side, noted that Miliband's supportive speeches "did not give the impression that the class struggle was going to be resolved at the university".

Among his family, Miliband had a reputation for being law-abiding, a consequence of a childhood spent in fear of policemen. On a more philosophical level, he was worried about what he saw as the narrow-minded aspects of the new 1960s radicalism and by its lack, as he wrote to a friend, of "any culture which is even approximately Marxist ... which no doubt sounds 'square', but is nevertheless the case. Sit[-in] they can, but think is another matter."

Miliband was now in his mid-40s. He would write half a dozen more books and hundreds more essays and articles. He would have many more crisply expressed insights into the workings of power in Britain and the world. He would edit the Socialist Register. He would remain an energising and much-cited figure in the academic world. But the rest of his career would, in some ways, be a rearguard action: against the more simplistic kind of radicalism spawned by the 1960s, and against the rightwing counter-revolution that followed.

In 1972, after the LSE authorities had heavy-handedly crushed the student revolt, Ralph left in disgust, for a job at Leeds. But British intellectual life outside London did not agree with him; after five years he moved to a series of temporary academic posts in the US. For long periods, Marion and the boys were left behind. Yet the family thrived, separations being a way of life for the Milibands. Ralph loved being a father. His fluid academic working hours meant that, when they were on the same side of the Atlantic, he was often at home. He accompanied his sons to muddy football games in the park. He stood behind the posts in the rain while David kept goal. And during general election campaigns, when a tribal loyalty to the left in general was awakened in him, he took his sons canvassing for the party that he spent the rest of the time deriding.

Read In the house of the rising sons part two