David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, has marked the halfway point of the marathon Labour leadership contest by narrowly emerging with the most constituency nominations, despite a strong challenge from his younger brother, Ed.
The brothers also promised their sibling love would survive whatever the result of a contest that Ed Miliband conceded was "odd".
But the Ed Miliband campaign still believes he will win the actual contest on 25 September on the basis of second preferences transferring to him.
All five campaign teams were assessing the state of the contest as the date for union, constituency Labour party (CLP) and MP nominations closed today.
Some evidence, fiercely contested by the David Miliband campaign, suggests many second preferences will switch to Ed Miliband as the other candidates – Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott – drop out as the ballot votes are counted.
Under Labour rules, the candidate with the least votes drops out, and their votes are transferred until one contestant has won more than 50% of the votes cast.
Ed Miliband was also formally confirmed today as the nominee of the largest affiliated union Unite. He had already won backing from the other two big unions, Unison and GMB.
On the final date for nominations, David Miliband had chalked up 165 constituency nominations and his brother 147. There is no guarantee that ordinary party members and union levy payers will vote in the same way as the activists that voted in the nomination process. Typically, CLP nominations were decided on the basis of only 50 or so votes, or 30,000 party members.
David Miliband also now has 91 nominations from the 258 Labour MPs and Ed only 63. Under party rules, the electoral college is divided in thirds between union political levy payers, MPs and constituency party members.
David Miliband needs to be clearly ahead in the early rounds of the ballot if most supporters of Burnham, Balls and Abbott have plumped for Ed Miliband once their candidate drops out.
Fragmentary evidence compiled by the website Left Foot Forward suggests David Miliband won his CLP nominations more narrowly than his brother, and that as many as half of second preferences are heading towards Ed Miliband.
In a rare piece of Labour mass democracy, David Miliband won the support of the Midlands Bassetlaw seat, the only party so far to hold a constituency-wide primary of 33,000 party members and supporters. David Miliband won 50.3% of the vote on the first ballot, and most second preferences. The constituency MP, John Mann,, claimed 33% of the electorate had returned ballot papers, and said he would be switching his support to the former foreign secretary.
Ed Miliband at a press conference today hinted that if elected he would soften Labour's general election commitment to halve the deficit in four years, saying he viewed the policy set out by the former chancellor Alistair Darling as "a starting point". He said "it was right to see if circumstances had changed because the deficit numbers have been improving since that plan, and to see what the right balance between tax and spending is". He said if elected he would have a new plan ready by 25 October, the date of the government spending review.
Balls has said he regards Darling's deficit reduction programme as going too fast. Ed Miliband welcomed the unions' support. He also called for a review of negative court interpretations of union strike ballot procedures and defended the level of public sector pensions. But he stressed that he opposed any change to the country's laws banning secondary strike action.
On the matter of the general election, he said: "We lost votes because people lost a sense of who we were and what we stand up for." He denied he was the candidate of the Labour comfort zone, or easy opportunism.
All five candidates face a gruelling summer attending more joint hustings before ballot papers start to go out.
The Burnham campaign insisted he was capable of overhauling one of the Milibands.
Balls's team believes his powerful campaigning on schools is winning him grassroots respect, and says he is losing out on CLP nominations by narrow numbers. The Diane Abbott campaign claims it has the support of the left, women and black activists.