Campaign aides and analysts declined to speculate on how this might affect the contest, suggesting that such discussions might be in bad taste now.
Miliband is the clear favourite to succeed Brown, but his comments about a "genuine contest" suggest he is keen to be seen to win it on merit.
His comments, to the centre-left Progress thinktank, came as the first public opinion poll in the Labour leadership contest suggested Corbyn was on course for a shock victory.
At the Ready for Hillary festival, Mitch Stewart, one of Obama's top organizers in the 2008 contest, suggested that Clinton needed to be careful to develop a message and stick to it.
A YouGov poll conducted after last week's LBC contest suggested that the debate had little influence on what those who were watching think about the big matter of whether or not Britain should leave the EU.
There, and in West Virginia and Montana, the Democratic incumbent is retiring, but in all three states, voters went resoundingly Republican in last year's presidential contest, suggesting that keeping the seat in Democratic hands will be an uphill battle.
But her thin margin of victory over Ovide LaMontagne, a conservative lawyer who spent little money yet drew strong grass-roots support in the final weeks of the contest, suggested more intraparty dissent than had been expected.
For much of the last two years, Labour has languished so far behind that it seemed almost out of the race, with byelections such as last summer's Glasgow East contest suggesting that its bedrock of working-class support had cracked, inviting speculation about whether there was any longer any limit at all on the depths to which the party could plunge.
The declining base of traditional members and the increasing financial demands (caused, in part, by the growth in the number of election contests) suggests that a retreat to a 'better yesterday' will be increasingly difficult to achieve.
The revelation of the guests for the latest runs of two celebrity talent contests suggest a definite shift in personnel.
