Daily Fashion Juice
Wednesday, October 05, 2011

It’s game, set and fashion mismatch

By Andrew Pierce

While David Cameron struggles to win over women, Labour leader Ed Miliband seems to be surrounded by them.

Just days after photos emerged of an Eastern European lady diligently washing Red Ed’s Ford Focus, it now transpires that he has been receiving private tennis coaching from a comely brunette.

Clad in an ill-fitting white T-shirt, black shorts and naff sports socks — all the better to show off his pasty, untoned legs — Miliband provided proof (as if any more was needed, after those shots of Boris Johnson jogging on Tuesday) that politicians should steer clear of exercising in public.

Labour leader Ed Miliband getting some tennis coaching at Waterlow Park.

However, the lessons will be vital if he is ever to take on the Prime Minister — who beat legend Boris Becker in a charity match in April. 


Mr Cameron, whose love of the game is well-known, also flew a British tennis coach out to instruct him while on holiday in Tuscany this summer, and has taken on former British No 1 Andrew Castle.

Miliband is also known as a tennis buff, spectating at Wimbledon and playing against his brother David, the former Foreign Secretary and his one-time rival for the leadership of the Labour Party (though one wonders how Ed fares against his brother on the court, without the unions to knee-cap David before the match).

Earlier this year Miliband cited motor-mouthed former world No 1 Jimmy Connors as one of his heroes, describing him as ‘bloody-minded and hard to beat’.

And the location of Miliband’s latest training session? North London’s Waterlow Park — only a tennis ball’s whack away from Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery.