Ed Miliband admits he was square as a youth but sidesteps 'Cleggover' question - The Guardian

Labour leader Ed Miliband said he was 'a bit square' as a youth and never dabbled in drink or drugs. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Ed Miliband has described himself as a "bit square" in his youth and reveals that he may have been "hit a few times" at the tough secondary school that he attended as a youngster.

But despite a smattering of revelations about his personal life, the Labour leader flatly refused to be drawn on the "Cleggover" question in an interview with Piers Morgan for GQ magazine.

Speaking in this month's issue, due out on Thursday, Miliband said he would "not boast about his sexual prowess" and refused to say how old he was when he lost his virginity, avoiding the pitfall of Nick Clegg, who in the same magazine in 2008 was pressed to admit that he had slept with as many as 30 women and considered himself a competent lover.

Pressed on his own track record in the field of romance, Miliband said, "that's the Cleggover question", in reference to the fuss that followed the revelations of the Liberal Democrat leader, now deputy prime minister. "I'm certainly not going to get into that," said Miliband. "I think that would be a big mistake."

The Labour leader only went as far as saying that the three famous women he would take to a desert island were Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher, actor Rachel Weisz and Hollywood A-lister Scarlett Johansson.

On his relationship with his partner, Justine Thornton, Miliband said he would not be getting married for political expediency.

Miliband has been criticised by traditionalists for failing to marry Thornton, a 40-year-old Cambridge-educated barrister, with whom he has two sons.

In the interview with Morgan, conducted on the day he returned from paternity leave last November, Miliband insisted that Thornton was not yet his wife, before reportedly quipping: "Thank God for that, probably."

The couple live in a £1.6m house owned by Thornton.

Asked for his views on marriage during the interview, Miliband made clear that pressure – political or otherwise – on him to tie the knot was counterproductive.

"It's a good institution and part of having stable families, but there are also people in unmarried relationships with stable families. I don't think politicians should order people to get married," he said.

He stressed that he intended to marry, but added: "But the more people who challenge me on it from a political standpoint, the more resistant I will become.

"We'll get married because we want to get married and love each other very much, no other reason."

On his relationship with his older brother, David, Miliband said that going up against his elder sibling in the Labour leadership election was the "hardest thing I've done in my life".

"I had mixed feelings when I won. But this thing you keep saying about it being his lifelong dream is nonsense, he didn't sit there at 14 thinking, 'I'm going to be leader of the Labour party'. I was surprised when I even made it into the cabinet."

Miliband admitted his father, Ralph, a Marxist who settled in Britain after emigrating as a refugee from Belgium, "wouldn't have liked New Labour very much".

Describing his father's death as "the saddest moment of my life", Miliband said his father's vulnerable health, which saw him having a heart attack when Miliband was just three years old, was one of the reasons he wasn't "so rebellious a kid".

He neither took drugs at Oxford University nor did he partake in underage drinking, and his only brush with the police was when he was slapped with a speeding offence.

"I was a bit square," he said.

On the playground beatings, Miliband said that he remembers the names of the boys who hit him, but would not divulge who they were.

And asked about his chosen talent if he were to appear on Britain's Got Talent, on which Morgan was once a judge, Miliband could only offer that he "used to be good at the Rubik's Cube".