Beware juicy family feuds that blow up into a nuclear issue

Is fratricide a terminal political act? It is, of course, fairly terminal for the "frater" who gets eliminated but how much of a problem is it for the one who does the dispatching?

This, perhaps, is the big underlying question of the British election. For the one thing that all voters know about Ed Miliband is that he secured the leadership of the Labour party over the corpse of his older brother David's political ambitions. Talk about the election in any social gathering and you will find at least one person in the room who considers Ed Miliband's actions unforgivable. "You just don't do that to your brother," runs the refrain. His crime was made greater because the pundit class saw David as more talented - though not talented enough to win - and more centrist. The acrimony is fuelled by vengeful Blairites who cannot forgive Ed his rejection of the faith and depict him as too leftwing. However unfairly, it is clearly an issue for Ed but its real salience remains untested.

On Thursday, the Conservative defence secretary Michael Fallon decided to test it with a clearly sanctioned but remarkably crass attack on the Labour leader, who, he said, could not be trusted with the security of the country because he had "stabbed his own brother in the back". In real combat this would have been one of those charging-the-gun attacks that tends to result in a posthumous medal for valour and a citation which begins "with no regard to his own safety".

It was also appropriate that the pretext for the attack was whether the Labour party could be trusted to renew the UK's Trident submarines. The fratricide, it turns out, is the Tories' nuclear option. Mr Fallon's central message - one would say subtext but Mr Fallon is not a politician who does subtext, even when the text is actually about subs - was that a man who would betray his own brother for power would also betray the country for his own ends. This "back-stabber" attack is wildly unfair. For one thing, Mr Miliband did not stab his own brother in the back; he stabbed his own brother in the front. That's the thing about a four month leadership campaign; it doesn't lend itself to secret stabbings.

Mr Fallon's attack was widely denounced as shabby, even by some members of his own party on social media, but he will not much care. He placed the issue back on the agenda and denunciations simply keep it alive. On the other hand, it is reassuring that the defence of the realm has been placed in the hands of a man who clearly believes in total war, even if Britain no longer has much of an army to fight it. The niceties of the Geneva Convention are not for Mr Fallon. He, clearly, is a man who would not stop at fighting them on the beaches; he would also fight them in the chalets and at the ice-cream vans, too.

The attack may be a sign of Tory jitters or it may have been long intended. Their campaign relies on voters concluding Mr Miliband is not PM material and deserting him in the final reckoning of the polling booth. Thus far the Labour leader is proving a scrappier fighter than the Tories anticipated, pushing them into unpopular positions with cunning policy announcements. With a hung parliament seen as the most likely outcome and the other parties more disposed to deal with Labour, the Tories need a clear win. Mr Miliband can come a close second and still become prime minister.

It may be a coincidence that last month Britain paid homage to one of the greatest family killers in its history. Richard III's role in the death of his brother George is widely disputed but he remains prime suspect in the murder of his nephews, the princes in the tower. Last month, crowds, royals and even celebrities gathered to watch the Archbishop of Canterbury read the burial rites over Richard's reinterred body in a new tomb in Leicester Cathedral. Mr Miliband will hope voters are more swiftly forgiving these days.

It may be that the power of the fratricide story is really just a symptom of Mr Miliband's wider failure to give voters a more powerful narrative of himself. He hopes the campaign will change that; the Tories naturally are fighting to keep it front and centre. Either way, we are about to find out if brother-stabbing truly is politically fatal.

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