Did I just hear David Miliband tell Radio 2's Jeremy Vine and an irate caller from Chippenham that "we're all in the shit together"? Alas, no, candour does not stretch that far in politics except in dire circumstances like May 1940 when it was the burden of Churchill's stirring wartime speeches. What the foreign secretary actually said was that Labour politicians are "all in the ship together" - sink or swim.
Tricky, isn't it? What do you do when you're a senior government minister whose calm-but-dangerous article on the perils facing his party has been interpreted to death by the pundits and the colleagues? Some of them have praised you. Others accused you of ambition or cowardice. Some said you should have used yesterday's press conference with the Italian foreign minister to hose down the excitement, others that you should shut up and go on holiday immediately.
That was Miliband's dilemma today, 36 hours after his 900-word Brown-free critique of the government's position (the Tory position too) appeared in the Guardian. What did he do? He popped up on the Jeremy Vine show and talked. The session was pre-booked some weeks ago because the pair ran out of time when they last chatted in February.
How did it all go? Quite well, from what I heard. Miliband insisted several times that it is the duty of a senior cabinet minister, especially during current hard times, to set out "Labour's record, Labour's vision for the future and to stand up to the Tories." The real test is whether you can take a punch and stand up again, he said.
Why no mention of Brown by name in his article? Because it's about "arguments and ideas, not personalities", he countered. Incidentally, Allegra Stratton sets out Miliband's own record on policy in an excellent piece in today's Guardian.
Vine wasn't having that get-out, of course. He unleashed the angry caller from Chippenham and played a clip of independent-minded Lancashire backbencher Geraldine Smith accusing him of just stirring things up.
"I'd sack him," said Smith, which is probably why she shouldn't be prime minister. The line from No 10 today is not as angry as the initial off-message response picked up yesterday by the London Evening Standard and run hard by pretty well everyone since. "The only people we're furious about is people who are going round being furious on our behalf," one Brownite source told me this morning. That's better.
Miliband told her he was just standing up for Labour's record. Gordon is the party leader - "I have always supported Gordon's leadership," he added - a man of huge experience and decent values. "The worst thing at this moment would be if we all went mute," he told Vine.
But why had he said that Labour "can" win the next election, asked Vine, a conditionality we all noted. Because it would sound arrogant and complacent to say that Labour "will" win - just what the voters don't want to hear when things are tough - higher gas bills dropping on the mat - the smooth young man explained.
It was a polished performance, so I felt. I can recall when David Owen, even younger, was foreign secretary at 38. Miliband may not be quite as clever, but he has a much better temperament for politics, more modest, more of a team player.
After a while and two records Vine opened up the discussion and let rip a furious (why are they all so angry?) female Eurosceptic. Easy peasy, she wasn't listening to his answers. But they were fine... zzz
