They are a remarkable contrast: David Cameron, 48, the red-cheeked toff who went to Eton and belonged to snooty clubs; and Ed Miliband, 45, the gawky, adenoidal, agnostic son of a Marxist Jewish refugee and historian.
Yet both are part of the English elite — the Tory clan of the southeast countryside in the case of Mr. Cameron, the incumbent prime minister, and the Labour clan of North London intellectuals for Mr. Miliband, his challenger in Thursday’s general election. Both went to Oxford University, both had early political mentors and a quick rise through party politics and government.
In some ways, their similarities signify the limits of their parties’ reach and help explain why British politics has become so fragmented even as it confronts an array of defining issues, from whether to maintain the Conservatives’ path of budget austerity to the place ofBritain in the European Union and the place of Scotland in the United Kingdom.
Both Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband, though part of a younger generation of leaders, have pulled their parties back to the past, toward older ideologies.
Mr. Cameron and his pal George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, have embraced the main tenet of Thatcherism — the belief in a smaller state that leaves more room for individual enterprise and the workings of the market. Through their continuing emphasis on deficit reduction and austerity, they have left the Tories open to charges of favoring the rich, of indifference to inequality and of abandoning the poor.
Mr. Miliband, by contrast, has turned his back on the “New Labour” of Tony Blair, who managed to win three elections with his move toward a market-oriented center-left. Mr. Miliband, whose first mentor was the prominent leftist Tony Benn, won the Labour leadership with the support of the trade unions, not the members of Parliament or the party membership, and he is considerably more to the left than Mr. Blair was.
That has opened him up to charges of indifference to budget deficits, distaste for business and the wealthy, and a love of further state intervention in nearly every possible field, from energy and rail prices to the housing market.
This is a campaign that has been more personal and poisonous than compelling, in part because, Scotland aside, the opinion polls have moved very little, and the outcome seems so murky.
And while both men are intelligent and articulate, they have both campaigned at a safe distance from most ordinary Britons, emphasizing television and radio interviews, set speeches and events in friendly locales with vetted audiences and a few carefully managed “walkabouts.”
Mr. Cameron has been criticized for seeming too calm, too pleasant and even lazy, a smoothness his critics ascribe to his cosseted upbringing and nearly a decade of work in public relations for a media company. He admits he has been urged to show more passion on the campaign trail.
After Mr. Cameron misspoke on Friday and called the election “career-defining” rather than “country-defining,” Mr. Miliband joked that Mr. Cameron has “finally found something he’s passionate about — it’s his own career.”
Accused of not caring about the disadvantaged and wanting to gut the National Health Service, Mr. Cameron often tells the story of his first child, Ivan, who was born with a congenital disease and died in 2009, age 6, while getting excellent care from the health service.
Mr. Cameron’s father, Ian, was a stockbroker who was born with severely deformed legs, and Mr. Cameron first experienced Conservative politics as a researcher for his godfather, a member of Parliament. Mr. Cameron was an excellent student, described by his Oxford tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” he has ever taught. Aides describe him now as polite, if sometimes insincere, and quick to make decisions — so quick that they sometimes ask him to think again.
Mr. Miliband, who fluffed a major speech to his party conference in September when he did it from a few notes, now uses a white lectern nearly everywhere he goes, with a teleprompter for speeches, to look more prime ministerial. He has worked on his voice and delivery with a debate coach and is wearing noticeably more expensive suits. And he only very rarely pairs them with a traditionally red Labour necktie, favoring midgray, blue and purple, just like Mr. Cameron.
More important, Mr. Miliband has shown resilience in the face of mockery from Britain’s largely right-wing press, which has featured photographs of him struggling to eat a bacon sandwich, questioned the patriotism of his father, accused him of fratricide for beating out his brother for the party leadership and compared him to the toothy character Wallace, from the “Wallace and Gromit” series of animated films.
Mr. Miliband has displayed a grasp of his material, some passion about inequality and a quickness of wit that has impressed voters, at least in England.
If Mr. Cameron is too quick to decide, Mr. Miliband is said to be indecisive, getting down into the weeds of every policy. But during the campaign, he has tried to suppress his inner wonkiness, has stopped using phrases like “predatory capitalism” and even survived a Madonna-like stumble over a platform during a live television question-and-answer show.
And he made a risky effort to reach out to younger voters by traveling to the London flat of the comedian Russell Brand for an interview, to argue that politics and voting bring about change. In defense of Mr. Miliband, young supporters have created a Twitter hashtag, #Milifandom, which portrays him instead as a superhero — brave, bold and sexy.
Similarly, he has an affection for the United States, where he lived at times when his father, Ralph Miliband, had various teaching jobs. He is a fan of the Red Sox and spent nearly two years as a visiting scholar at Harvard, where he got to know John Kerry, now secretary of state.
But Mr. Miliband has emphasized his policy distance from Washington, especially in military matters in contrast to Mr. Blair’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he has stressed the importance of Britain’s membership in the European Union in the face of Mr. Cameron’s promise, if still in office, to have a referendum on British membership by the end of 2017.
It is possible, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, that Labour under Mr. Miliband may even win more votes in England than the Tories.
Neither Mr. Cameron nor Mr. Miliband, however, appears to have been prepared for the way in which the resurgent nationalist movement in Scotland would upend the elections.
In Scotland, long a Labour stronghold, Mr. Miliband is less popular than even Mr. Cameron, and Labour is expected to lose most of its 41 seats there to the Scottish National Party and its new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, who is not even running for the British Parliament. (The Conservatives have only a single seat in Scotland.)
Based on the latest polling, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party is widely expected to win the most seats nationwide in Parliament, but fall well short of a majority. Mr. Miliband is expected to have the most options for cobbling together a coalition with smaller parties, and so may end up prime minister anyway, after a tricky dance with the Scottish nationalists.
If Mr. Miliband’s hopes for victory have been undermined by his party’s collapse in Scotland, Mr. Cameron’s have been damaged by the rise of the U.K. Independence Party, which wants to leave the European Union and put strict controls on immigration. UKIP will win only a few seats, but might come in second in many constituencies, which could deny victory to Tory candidates and re-election to Mr. Cameron.
A renewal of the current two-party coalition looks unlikely, because Mr. Cameron’s partners, the Liberal Democrats, have been badly hurt by their junior status in government, and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, could even lose his seat.
But given the weaknesses of both Labour and the Tories, the Liberal Democrats are likely to be part of the next government no matter who is prime minister.
Still, days before the election, no one is sure of anything except a hung Parliament and a period of coalition negotiations, during which Mr. Cameron will remain prime minister and try to hold on to his job.
The process promises to be bitter, which will only add to the enmity between Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband, who have faced each other in sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions, the fierce and theatrical battle of wits in Parliament, on scores of occasions.
Now the battle will have politically fatal consequences — the man who loses out is almost sure to be discarded as leader of his party, and given the unsentimental nature of British party politics, pretty quickly, too.
