In an unexpected reunion,Britain's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband met up with a long-lost kin through a radio talk show in Moscow. Miliband was in Russia to debate global warming as a guest on a Moscow-based radio show yesterday. Prepped to face questions on Co2 emissions,plans were thrown out of kilter when the voice of an elderly woman appeared on the line. The caller told the British secretary "I am Sofia Davidovna Miliband,I am your relative. I am the only one left." Engineers cut her off fearing she was a hoaxer. But after much translation and a call to his mother in the UK,the British minister worked out that his great-great grandfather was the brother of Sofia's grandfather. "I think she was much less interested in what my brother David (Britain's foreign Secretary) or I do,than in making the family connection and realising that there was a branch of the Miliband family in Britain," Miliband said. The British ambassador and dozens of invited guests were left stranded at an embassy reception as Miliband raced off to meet his long-lost kin. It turned out that Sofia Davidovna Miliband is an 86-year-old academic. She was once a leading expert on Iran at the Moscow School of Oriental Studies. Both of them had been born in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw in Poland. Ed Miliband's grandfather fled Poland in the 1920s and ended up in Belgium. He fled again ahead of Hitler's invading army and made it to Britain on forged papers with his son,Ed and David Miliband's father. Unknown to them another part of the Miliband clan had come east to Moscow. Miliband told BBC Radio 4's PM programme his relative was "an amazing woman". "I did sort of vaguely know when I was a boy about her existence. The way I know about it,if you look on a library computer her name pops up. "I've always slightly wondered about her ever since I was a kid,it was amazing for me to come face to face with her."
