David Miliband on Monday criticized his brother Ed Miliband's failed campaign to become Britain's prime minister, but also stressed that he won't run for the leadership of the Labor Party now that his younger brother has stepped down.
Speaking to the BBC, Miliband said that voters "didn't want what was being offered" by Labor when they gave a majority victory to Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives. The result, he said, was "devastating" for the progressive cause.
David said that his brother Ed, like former Prime Minister Gordon Brown during the 2010 election, allowed himself to be portrayed as "moving backwards from the principles of aspiration and inclusion."
David, a former foreign secretary who resigned from Parliament to head the International Rescue Committee in New York after his brother Ed defeated him in the race for the party leadership, stressed that he remains committed to that job.
David said he had been in touch with Ed since the election, and praised him for showing "enormous dignity and courage" in the face of bruising attacks during the campaign.
He also said that "many of the attacks on Ed were unpleasant and unfair and I think he dealt with them with enormous dignity and with courage… I've always said you remain brothers for life and that's something that has to be kept."
Asked whether Labor would have been better off if he had been chosen as leader, David Miliband said there was "no point in trying to press the rewind button in life".
Despite being of Jewish descent - albeit a self-declared atheist - Ed Miliband was estimated to get only 22% of the Jewish vote in a recent poll, as opposed to 69% for Cameron given his staunch support for Israel.
Miliband pushed through a symbolic but highly controversial bill to recognize the "State of Palestine" regardless of negotiations with Israel.