David Miliband on his vision for Labour... and the leadership

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with the Standard, the Foreign Secretary issues a rallying cry to Labour to "raise its game" and engage in a "new can-do, confident spirit" to win back disaffected voters.

Mr Miliband said: "Cynicism and defeatism are the enemies we need to confront. We have the right values and instincts to win, but we mustn't underestimate the degree of dissatisfaction."

He expects Gordon Brown to remain leader until the next election, but his forthright comments about morale and direction in Labour will be seen as his clearest indication yet that he is intending to run for the top job.

"The lessons of the Government's handling of the economic crisis are that we need a radical and modern approach to the challenges we face," he added.

On a visit including meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Pakistani president, Mr Miliband scotched rumours he could be set for a reshuffle move in the summer.

He said: "What I want is to stay in this job, which I love. I've only got another four years to go till I pass Ernie Bevin's record in the job."

It's a very Milibandish trait, wrapping up a political point in a joke, but he has just made clear in his own way that he is digging in his heels. He's here to work with the Secretary of State on Afghanistan and the attempts to revive a Middle East process. But the subject that dogs him is of Labour's unravelling grip on power — and the sense of deepening disgust at the revelation of MPs' Arthur Daley entrepreneurship with expenses claims.

He speaks for the penitent tendency. "We have to show we get it," he says, of the punitive public mood. "The next election is not just a matter of votes and who wins and loses: it's a matter of honour as well.

"There's a collective sense that we have let people down. We can't make excuses; we have to show we understand that." That's a sorry then? "Of course it is. Absolutely."

The next election is widely predicted as a bloodbath for Labour. "It is rescuable," he insists. "New Labour is not dead." The polls suggest otherwise.

"Well, it's like taking a weather check in the middle of a tornado," is the reply.

Still trim and youthful, he now has telltale criss-cross lines of stress on his forehead. He courteously namechecks Mr Brown as "doing the right thing" — on big issues.

But the expenses scandal, he knows, is another millstone round Labour's electoral neck. His own accounts contain a note from his gardener querying the need for pot plants in his South Shields constituency garden ("I immediately agreed we didn't need them and that was that") and a claim for a pushchair for one of his children ("I made an error on that").

He adds: "No one can overstate the fury and contempt associated with the expenses row."

I point out that the Speaker, Michael Martin, is quoted as saying he wanted to "get what is owed to me" — and get tightly folded arms and a grimace in return. "We now have to fight for our reputation, so we all have to face up to the damage that's been done: all of us."

As the long-standing lead candidate of the Blairite wing of Labour for the leadership post-Brown, he had a bruising experience last autumn, when the spotlight first fell on him and he was pilloried as unready — photographed ineptly holding a banana. How much did the mockery wound?

"Er, well, I did learn from it: for one thing, finger foods are out — and beware fruit! You do live and learn as you go on. That's the thing about politics: just when you think it can't get any better, it does, and when you think it can't get any worse, it sometimes does that too."

So, what's it to be: are you up for it? "I really won't go there. I rule nothing in and nothing out and it's invidious, where we are now, to talk about it." He's talking fast at this point: almost breathlessly. So he's not counting himself out? "I said what I meant."

Then he segues straight into what sounds suspiciously like his own patented recovery programme for the party. "The three questions to my mind are: can we win, where are we heading and what is our vision to get there? We can only answer the first question when we're clear with the voters about the other two.

"I do want to use this interview to say, I think our progressive values are still our strength: but we have to govern well and we need a compelling prospectus for the future of the country as well."

He and his musician wife Louise have two adopted boys and he is intense about privacy. There's not a lot of showcasing of family life. But maybe top politicians need to let voters in closer to their home life so as not to come across, as Miliband can, as aloof and a tad distant?

"It's true I do want to protect my children: I love them so much, it's a natural thing to do. And there's also a consideration of how they grow up."

His background, as the son of a leading socialist intellectual, is solidly progressive North London. At one point he mention's "Ed" doing a great job on climate change, without apparently considering it noteworthy that he has a brother in the Cabinet. He's not spent a lot of time away from Planet Labour.

He's met David Cameron three times — including at a Radiohead concert. They're direct Oxford contemporaries, who could well could end up as Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition.

"We have good banter," he says. "Likeability's not Cameron's problem. What irks me is that he has taken the idea of a progressive society, a Labour aim in public policy, not a Tory one, and now he says that it is a Conservative goal. It's not credible."

He is still close to his old Downing Street boss Tony Blair, but makes the point that they talk mainly on the phone and on international issues. "We're not going to reinvent some Buddha of 1997 to worship," he says.

"If we came out with a 1997 pledge card I don't think people would be very impressed."

Has he though about what could happen to Labour in opposition? "Every moment in Opposition is completely futile," he says with a sigh. "That's why we have to fight for every vote. Things can change quickly."

He's been reading biographies of great US leaders and alludes to the 19th-century Democrat Andrew Jackson. "Mind you," he adds, with a mischievous glint, "he went on to be President."

I boarded the plane unsure as to whether Mr Miliband really does want the job of Labour leader, whenever the moment of reckoning does come. By the end of his visit, there could be no doubt.