The first Miliband book?

I am delighted to learn that two friends and former colleagues are teaming up to write what will probably be the first book on the Miliband brothers - with emphasis, of course, on whichever brother wins.

Allegra Stratton was my first producer when I became political editor of Newsnight and she went off to achieve great success on the Guardian.

Lance Price worked for me when I edited the Oxford University newspaper Cherwell back in 1977. He later become a political correspondent for the BBC, and then worked as deputy to Alastair Campbell in Downing Street. He's been planning such a book for a couple of years now.

It's not easy writing a biography of a newly elected party leader. They'll be hindered by a combination of deference towards the coming man, and fear of upsetting him. It's only after the event that people start opening up.

And in the case of the Milibands, their poor mother Marion Kozak is very protective of the family privacy, as I have discovered whilst making a family profile which is due to be broadcast on Newsnight over the next few days. Yet I have come to the view that Mrs Miliband is probably a more important figure in the boys' background than their famous father, the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband.

Price and Stratton are being quick off the mark. It was 18 months before James Hanning and Francis Elliott published the first biography of David Cameron. And Iain Duncan Smith has yet to have a book written about him - the only post-war Leader of the Opposition of whom that is the case.