A shadow cabinet of breadth and gravitas

For one thing, the options will not include his brother David, who has made it clear that he will not be a member of his younger brother's team.

For another, the shadow cabinet will be selected from a field chosen by MPs, not by the party leader, a curious remnant of old politics which, somehow, both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to reform.

So, his cast of shadow ministers will include some of the old guard such as Alan Johnson as well as younger, newer faces. That, however, is no bad thing. Mr Miliband was only elected to Parliament in 2005 and badly needs some compensating gravitas in the team that only experience can provide. And for all his efforts to distance himself from Labour's record, he needs some sense of continuity.

But the proof of Mr Miliband's worth will lie chiefly in how well he rises to the challenge of the deficit and the response of the public sector unions to the cuts intended to tackle it. He has promised to support the Government where necessary and on some cuts.

We shall see how he chooses his battles, and how well he deals with colleagues whose instinct is to fight swingeing spending reductions, even though Labour, in government, committed itself to halving the deficit in four years. Defence is one area where the party could articulate a rational case for limiting cuts. Mr Miliband's job is to appoint to senior positions colleagues who understand those hard choices.

Defence of the realm

Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, put his finger on the problem with the Government's strategic review when he said, in a leaked letter to David Cameron, that it more closely resembled a spending review. Trouble is, he may be right.

British long-term strategic defence needs are being decided on a timescale determined by the need for swingeing spending cuts. It will be the Treasury that really decides how deep the cuts will be. He is right that draconian cuts cannot be made without consequences: for instance, the proposal to sell or mothball half the surface fleet would limit our options way into the future.

Mr Fox may exaggerate in suggesting that Britain's frontline troops may be undermined by this review but not by very much. The Prime Minister has promised to defend frontline troops but large scale reductions in numbers must, eventually, affect the conduct of the war.

And there are large, second-order areas of defence spending which could fall victim to budget constraints on grounds of cost, not of national security. Even if Afghan deployments are protected, a cut of 10 per cent in the budget could mean the loss of tens of thousands of jobs across the services, which makes the apparent decision to commission two aircraft carriers harder to understand.

There were always going to be MoD cuts but the scale of them — less, in fact, than in other departments — is affected by the decision to ringfence NHS spending. Mr Fox has made some pertinent points: they need answers.

A living wage

The provost of UCL, Malcolm Grant, has acceded to a campaign by staff and students to pay his cleaning staff a living London wage of £7.50 an hour. UCL had been the only college in the University to pay its cleaners just £5.80 an hour: the change will make all the difference to the workers' lives. This kind of compassionate solidarity is part of what the Big Society should be about.