Sell Watches To You

Ed Miliband has scored a minor historic first by being the only unmarried man ever to be elected leader of the Labour Party – though that says more about how society has changed than it says about him.

He is in a relationship with Justine Thornton, a 40-year-old, Cambridge-educated environmental lawyer. They have an 15-month-old son, Daniel, and another boy is due in November – raising the possibility that in 40 years the brothers will be fighting to follow their father's footsteps as leader of the Labour Party.

Until the 1990s, the revelation that a politician had had a child outside marriage was potentially career destroying, and one Sunday paper referred yesterday to the old-fashioned concept of "wedlock", but the new Labour leader's married status is unlikely to affect his standing with the public.

When questioned about his status by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Miliband said that he thought they would get around to getting married, but did not say when.

"Ed does believe in marriage," said a spokeswoman yesterday, "but he doesn't think for one second that he loves Justine any less or that they are in any less of a strong relationship because they aren't married."

Ms Thornton was in Manchester to witness her partner's triumph, but headed back to London yesterday. She will return tomorrow to listen to him deliver his first leader's speech. Like Nick Clegg's wife, Miriam, she will continue with her legal career rather than give up her job, like Samantha Cameron, and drop into the role of a politician's wife.

The couple met five years ago, and live together in Primrose Hill, north London, close to where the Miliband brothers grew up. David Miliband lives nearby.

They kept their relationship out of the public eye until March last year, when right-wing newspapers went on the attack because he was the climate change secretary, and she was advising Eon, the German energy company.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change asserted that Ms Thornton had not worked on any cases "in which DECC is the decision-maker".

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It is a long way from Liverpool, but New York was not the escape Nick Clegg might have hoped for. First he had to perform Vince Cable damage control before speeding to a New York University town hall event to tell of strange things going on in Britain: opposing parties talking to each, governing together even.

All that was before most of Manhattan had had breakfast. Only much later was the Deputy Prime Minister released into the baffling maze of the United Nations to tell other people about other strange things going on in Britain: an austerity government willing, nay eager, to increase spending on aid abroad.

Mr Clegg might make a decent American politician – he has the town hall format down pat and some say he wasn't bad in the election leaders' debates. On the other hand, he wouldn't last five minutes here on account of his frankness about the lapses of the country he co-governs. Not patriotic enough.

There is, Mr Clegg told NYU, much "uncivilised and irrational debate" going on in Parliament "every day". The way in which power is centralised in Britain "beggars belief", and voters at home are burdened with a political system that is "creaky and clapped out". With good old English irony, he also quipped: "Personally, I like democracy. I think we should start practising it in the United Kingdom."

The discussion, of course, was about the voting reform to be put to a referendum next year. But the students were gripped most by this notion that rival parties can co-operate. The language of "someone's up and someone's down" is giving way, he said, to a "more complex idiom where people are open to all kinds of difference and are grown-up about the differences".

His argument that sustaining Britain's commitment to foreign development aid is about "enlightened self-interest" – his most frequently uttered phrase of the day – was uncontroversial at NYU, at least. Some at the UN, who have not matched their rhetoric on the Millennium Development Goals with cash, might think "pious" while smiling and shaking his hand.

What left the students puzzled, perhaps, was his analysis of shifts occurring in politics not just in Britain but everywhere. Whether he cheered or scared them was hard to tell. But the old status quo, he said, is crumbling. "Something seems to be going on in political democracies and we don't where it is going to evolve," he offered. "The old tribalism is collapsing. All democracies are dealing with this."

If old orders are indeed on their way out, whither Democrats and Republicans? Is America ready for its duopoly of political power finally to falter? Could an independent rule the country, say, with a Tea Party deputy leader or the other way about? Mr Clegg may have just suggested a ticket for 2012: Bloomberg-O'Donnell. Those crazy, naive British. Don't be fooled by this clean-cut leader comes here all sane, sensible and "grown-up". Unhinged.

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Marine Le Pen was late back from lunch. This is a common condition among French politicians but very unusual for Marine Le Pen. She is known for being always on time and for being polite, charming and, unlike her father, difficult to dislike. She arrived "only" 20 minutes late. And she wanted the readers of The Independent to know that they had been misinformed for years about the National Front, which is, she says, not a racist party, or a xenophobic party, not even a far-right party but a "patriotic party" of neither left nor right.

If she takes over its leadership from her father in January (which she almost certainly will), she intends to "sweep away the caricatures" and transform the National Front from a party of protest into a "party of government". She said: "To exercise power is the objective of all politicians. The National Front is still a young party. We should now be ready to take a step upwards and have no fear of assuming responsibility. If the party does not want to win, I don't want to lead them. That wouldn't interest me. I'm not ready to settle for a permanent posture of complaint."

When she entered politics, Jean-Marie Le Pen's youngest daughter was a large and somewhat lumbering woman. She looked like Stephen Fry in drag. Ten years later, as she prepares to replace her father, 42-year-old Marine is slender, elegant and tanned. She wears a grey jacket, a grey blouse, tight blue jeans and high heels. Her supporters hope – and her enemies inside and outside the party fear – that she will achieve an equally startling transformation (or, in French, un re-looking radical) of the National Front.

Alain Duhamel, France's shrewdest political commentator, says: "Marine is just as demagogic as her father and even more dangerous. Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted only to be a player, to be noticed, to show off. Marine Le Pen wants to win and to rule."

Her 82-year-old father will retire as president of the National Front in January. A party conference will choose his successor from a short-list of two. The candidates are his bookish, grey, unreconstructed, hard-line deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, 60, and the youngest of his three, daughters, Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, always known as "Marine". Jean-Marie, the founder and colossus of the party, has already made it known that he thinks that Marine will, and should, win.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the French Presidency in 2007 partly by reclaiming votes from the NF, is worried. His decision in July to make a theatrical link between foreigners and crime by declaring war on Roma immigrants from eastern Europe is admitted in the Elysée Palace to be part of an "anti-Marine" strategy.

But is her drive to "sweep away misconceptions" about theNF not, de facto, an attack on her dear old dad? She says that the media "demonised" the NF. But what about Jean-Marie Le Pen's own extremist statements over the years? (Too many black players in the France football team; immigration is a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy France.)

That was then, she says. This is now. "It's true that, 30 years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen maybe used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas. There is no need to use such methods today because, in so many areas, the facts have proved that the National Front was right. On uncontrolled immigration. On the EU. On globalisation. On ultra-capitalism. Even President Sarkozy seems to agree with us on a number of subjects. We are now in a position where we can offer solutions, not just try to convince people that we have identified the right problems. That changes everything."

Marine Le Pen believes that not only in France, but all across Europe, the time is right for a less histrionic, more pragmatic form of populist nationalism. This would be anti-immigration but "not racist"; anti-EU but not anti-European; anti-globalisation but not anti-market. Every country is different, she says (as a good nationalist should) but the rise of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Gianfranco Fini in Italy and a middle class, populist right in Flanders, all point in the same direction.

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In any other election cycle, at any other moment in Delaware's political history, Mike Castle would be coasting to victory. A two-time governor and longtime member of Congress, Castle, 71, has $2.6 million in the bank, a statewide approval rating in the high 60s and the backing of just about every official Republican institution in the country, including the Delaware state party, which in May endorsed him to run for Vice President Joe Biden's old Senate seat.

But in Castle's more than 40 years as a politician, he has never had to deal with someone quite like Amy Kremer, a former flight attendant from Atlanta who arrived in Delaware on Tuesday, only one week before the Sept. 14 Republican primary. Hours later, she gathered reporters and activists in a Wilmington hotel to officially christen Castle the latest target of the voter rebellion known as the Tea Party. "The time has come for us to put down the protest signs and pick up the campaign signs and get engaged," Kremer announced, adding that her group would spend at least $250,000 to oust the Delaware GOP's political patriarch in favor of Christine O'Donnell, a tenacious conservative pundit and Tea Party standard bearer. "We have stood on the sidelines for long enough," Kremer said.

Just months ago, the views of a self-styled Citizen Jane would have been little more than a curiosity. Hardly anyone noticed in January when her group, the Tea Party Express, ran television ads in Massachusetts to support the long-shot election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate. Nor were the political cognoscenti particularly interested in April when the group endorsed Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, a little-known Republican also-ran then polling at just 5% in that state's GOP primary. And the smart money scoffed at Kremer's subsequent push for Alaska's Joe Miller, a local attorney on a seemingly impossible quest to unseat Senator Lisa Murkowski.

But then Brown, Angle and Miller all stunned the handicappers by winning their races, proving that the Tea Party was more than just a ragtag group with funny hats and signs. The Express and other Tea Party groups have demonstrated that Republican voters given a choice between the Establishment and an upstart will usually choose the outsider in 2010. "I think everybody is shocked," says Kremer, whose cell-phone ringtone is Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America." "We do it because we believe."

Though the Tea Party's successes so far have played out in GOP primaries, Kremer and her troops have the potential to transform the U.S. Senate. In addition to Angle and Miller, who both have solid shots at victory in November, two other Tea Party favorites, Utah's Mike Lee and Kentucky's Rand Paul, are favored to win. That means the Senate could have as many as four new Tea Party champions next year. In a capital city where compromise has long been out of fashion, it may soon go missing altogether.

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Her abrupt style has reduced C-list celebrities to tears and enraged political protesters but Sky News presenter Kay Burley came off the worst in an on-air spat yesterday when an MP accused her of being "a bit dim".

Burley was interviewing Labour MP Chris Bryant about the Commons debate on the News of the World phone-hacking story. When Burley challenged Bryant to provide evidence for his claim that phone hacking and other illegal techniques were "endemic" in the newspaper industry in the past, he cited a report by the Information Commissioner that identified more than 1,000 cases.

Burley said: "So you are in a position to have listened to the debate and read the report and as a result you are content to say that on telly."

Bryant replied: "I have just said that. You seem to be a bit dim, if you don't mind me saying so."

When Burley implied Bryant could have avoided having his phone hacked if he had changed the PIN for his answering machine, the MP refuted it. He said: "Don't lie, don't say what you don't know madam."

Burley's brusque manner has been repeatedly criticised. Upwards of 880 complaints were made after she reduced Peter Andre to tears when she asked him how he would feel if the new husband of his former wife, Katie Price, wanted to adopt their children.

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