Ted, the class warrior who changed his name

SPORTING a pudding-bowl haircut and wearing a grey woolly jumper, do you recognise this rebel student being i nterviewed about a ‘rent strike’ he was leading at university 24 years ago? Yes — it’s a young Ed Miliband. Newly unearthed video footage shows the man who would now be PM telling a Meridian TV reporter about his opposition to a 27 per cent increase in student rents at Oxford.

The clip, from 1991, shows 19-year-old Miliband — with his unmistakeable nasal drawl and stuttering delivery — saying: ‘People wouldn’t get angry if it wasn’t unaffordable and it clearly is an unaffordable rise.’

Shown the footage yesterday, the Labour leader said he was known back then as ‘Ted’ and explained t hat he ‘ made progress’ with the protest. But according to his biographer, although Miliband saw i ts ‘ pluralist and broad- based nature’ as an achievement, the rent strike was unsuccessful.

While rival David Cameron famously joined the toffish Bullingdon Club at Oxford, Ed proudly described the rent dispute as his ‘best four weeks at university’. Miliband’s biography also revealed that the Marxist professor’s son arranged a ‘silent hand-clap’ protest against his college head, historian Sir Keith Thomas, with students lining the street near his home and staging a boycott of a formal Corpus Christi College dinner.

Marc Stears, one of the Labour leader’s oldest friends, has said that Miliband is ‘exactly the same person’ now as he was as a student. ‘He could also get down and dirty and make people’s lives hell. He could walk between the two worlds of radicalism and real world.’