The Guardian today had a profile of New Labour’s rising star, the 37-year-old schools minister, David Miliband. The story observes that

Miliband is a bit of preacher, as one might expect from the son of a famous Marxist thinker.</p> I just love the juicy irony that the son of Ralph Miliband, who is best known as the leading proponant of the “instrumentalist” school of Marxist state theory (which focuses the relationship between the state’s bureaucratic elite and the capitalist class) is now being described as the “next prime minister but one”:

His late father would be proud of that success – and perhaps a little bemused by it. Ralph Miliband was one of the foremost Marxist theorists of the twentieth century. The joke among today’s left-wingers goes like this: Ralph Miliband argued that the Labour Party would never do anything for the working class; his son is going to prove it.</p> Heh.