Who's funding Miliband D?

Ed Miliband is paddling away from the new Labour ship, fearing it will sink and suck him under. All the leadership candidates have written essays for the Fabian Society.

In his essay Ed makes efforts to criticise the way new Labour had turned off "lower income groups" until they "simply stopped voting" and he proposes a few ways to try to fix the "crisis of support among our working-class base."

I was particularly pleased to see that he worries about the way Labour in power "refused to prioritise the building of new social housing."

In the leadership election a vote for Diane Abbott is the best way to demonstrate a commitment to actual socialist values, but the fact that Miliband E wants to put some pink water between him and the holed hulk of new Labour also offers some hope.

It is a pink tinge, dressed up with bits of praise for the new Labour project and some kind words for Blair, but it is still a pleasure to read Miliband E attacking "new Labour nostalgia" and the cosy suffocation of the "new Labour comfort zone."

His opening sentence that "without values we become managers and technocrats" sounds very like an attack on the continuity new Labour of Miliband D.

Because Miliband D is the technocrat's technocrat. David Miliband's soulless, bland, apolitical management-speak is hypnotisingly dull.

He is so soporific that it is dangerous to operate heavy equipment after exposure to his speeches. If you are driving after contact with David Miliband, it is advisable to wind the window down and let in a little fresh air to avoid nodding off at the wheel, or perhaps stop at a service station for a short break.

David Miliband walks straight into his brother's trap by opening his Fabian leadership essay with the sentence: "We need to engage honestly with our strengths and weaknesses so we can fashion a Labour ethic for our time that helps us define our priorities and rebuild trust with the electorate."

Substitute the name of any leading consumer brand for the word "Labour" and you have a middle manager addressing his sales executives in a conference centre off the M1.

You can hear the squeak of the dry-wipe marker pen on the whiteboard as David Miliband urges his executives to deal with falling sales.

David's idea of inspirational talk is to urge his party to "understand how we find ourselves in this position and to break its dynamics and generate a different outcome."

While Miliband D waffles, money talks. Indeed the money driving his Labour leadership campaign doesn't just talk - it swears.

Because David Miliband is raising cash from some ugly sources. He has £324,000 of donations for the leadership campaign - more than six times the amount his brother raised.

Miliband D is trying to buy the Labour leadership. One of the largest donations - £50,000 - comes from public relations millionaire Anthony Bailey.

Bailey is a lobbyist for a bevy of reactionaries and reprobates. His clients include BAE Systems, the arms firm embroiled in many bribery scandals.

Bailey's clients also include the reactionary customer of BAE, Saudi Arabia, and he has represented other countries with dubious human rights regimes like Syria and Morocco and oil firms like Shell. His main lobbying vehicle is his company Eligo International.

Bailey loves to emphasise his relationships with European royalty. He brought together his arms trade, lobbying and royalist businesses together in one grotesque package when he launched Painting and Patronage - a BAE-funded promotion of the paintings of Prince Charles and Saudi Prince Khalid.

Bailey is quite proud of his backward and reactionary pals. He runs a "forum" and boasts about all the vaguely royal Eurotrash he gets along.

Just to give a flavour of the lobbyist's creepy circles, Bailey boasts of having "the former King Constantine of the Hellenes" at one of his forums.

Known as "Constantine the Little" in Greece, he is a truly pathetic figure. King Constantine swore in the fascist colonels in 1967. When the uppity fascists refused to be nice to their king, he tried to launch his own feeble counter-coup, which was a laughable failure.

Since Greeks rose up and brought back democracy, the people have wanted nothing to do with Constantine. He made himself even more unpopular by suing Greece for millions of euros of "reparations" for losing his throne.

As well as loving burned-out royals, Bailey is keen on the Catholic hierarchy. He is a member of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, a Catholic "dynastic order of knighthood."

And he likes to impose his personal religious beliefs on the rest of us. Bailey is a keen promoter of religious academy schools, especially those linked to the Anglican United Learning Trust.

Since 2003 he has encouraged anti-abortion politics by acting as patron of the "all-party parliamentary pro-life group."

Modernising Miliband isn't only funded by royalist anti-abortion arms trade lobbyists.

Another £50,000 donation to Miliband's Labour leadership campaign fund comes from David Claydon, a leading British banker.

Claydon became a Morgan Stanley managing director in 2005, where he stayed until he joined Union Bank of Switzerland this May.

Both Morgan Stanley and UBS were deeply involved in the financial crisis, both losing hundreds of millions of pounds thanks to overextended loans. UBS is also one of the government's advisers trying to privatise Royal Mail.

Another regular source of money for Miliband comes from rich former supporters of the Social Democratic Party. First it tried to destroy the Labour Party from the outside. Now it is nibbling away from the inside.

David Sainsbury bankrolled the SDP. Now he is paying £63,000 to Miliband's leadership campaign. Parry Mitchell, who made his millions in the leasing business, helped found the SDP in 1980. He stood twice for the party, in Ealing and Acton in 1983 and Salisbury in 1987. He gave £10,000 to Miliband's campaign. Miliband is the SDP's plan B.

But not all Miliband's cash-rich pals have skeletons in their closet.

Duncan Kenworthy gave £25,000. He doesn't work for arms dealers or bankers - he made his money co-creating Fraggle Rock and producing Four Weddings And A Funeral.