There is a certain doubleness at play in the character of Ed Miliband, a tension between the idealism of the man who ran for the Labour leadership and the realism of one who now has the responsibility to lead. He's not self-divided exactly, like Mr Goliadkin, the tormented clerk in Dostoevsky's novella The Double, but he can be self-doubting, torn as he is between what he would like to do as Labour leader and what the conservatism of the wider political culture will allow him to do.

“Those of us who worked with Ed on the campaign - the original team - are nostalgic for those times," says one supporter. "It felt purer back then. We still believe in Ed, but he's changed a lot - he feels the responsibility greatly. And we're not sure about some of the people he's got around him now."

I interviewed Miliband twice during the leadership contest and spoke often to some of the key operatives in Team Ed, the self-described flame-carriers. They liked to style themselves back then as insurgents. They were taking on the forces of reaction within the Labour Party. There was something Thatcheresque about the way, as a small group, they sought to come from the margins to seize control of the party, a quasi-Bolshevik movement that demanded change through the force of their ideas and desire to disrupt the established order. During his first speech as leader, Miliband made great play of representing Labour's "new generation", like some contemporary Pete Townshend.

A modern Croslandite

Now, all these months later, two views of Miliband are beginning to harden among those flame-carriers who are, or have been, closest to him. To some, he remains Good Ed, the same idealist who ran for the leadership, but to others he has become a calculating realist, Bad Ed. The instincts of Good Ed are those of a conviction politician. He knows what is wrong in Britain - the gap between rich and poor is too wide and ever widening, our market economy is unbalanced and needs properly regulating, the state is the engine through which greater equality can be achieved, there is more to life than the acquisition of another car, and so on. Good Ed has a point of departure and a destination. His mantra during the leadership contest was that he had no wish to repeat the New Labour playbook.

He defined himself against the market dogma, militarism and authoritarianism of New Labour and against his brother, David, who stoically sought to defend the record of the last Labour government including, disastrously for him, the Iraq war.

Good Ed did not exactly disown the record, but he never hurried to embrace it. He portrayed himself as anti-establishment. Or, at least, he reached back to embrace an older, deeper Labour establishment. "We've got our party back," enthused Neil Kinnock, one of his most prominent supporters. "Ed is a modern Croslandite," Roy Hattersley told me, "because he is a libertarian and believes it is the obligation of the state not to impose equality, but to promote it."

The trouble for Good Ed is that he has no route map, it is said; the summit of the mountain is there before him, but he does not know how to climb it. He's not exactly stuck at base camp, but neither does he know the way ahead. He has willing and able Sherpas around him - the admirable (Lord) Stewart Wood, consigliere and minister without portfolio in the shadow cabinet; (Lord) Maurice Glasman, the "Blue Labour" communitarian thinker; Chuka Umunna, the young MP who has impressed with his performances on the Treasury select committee; Lucy Powell, who narrowly missed out on winning the seat of Manchester Withington at the last election - but are they all moving him along in the same direction?

The instincts of Bad Ed are also those of a conviction politician, but one who is prepared to compromise and triangulate, to do deals, to court the Murdoch press. All good for a party leader who wants to win elections, one would have thought. Bad Ed, it is said, listens too much to Tom Baldwin, the Blairite bruiser who moved from the Times to work as his head of media relations. Miliband may have sharpened up and professionalised the media operation, but for some he is too deliberative, slow to strike out in bold and unorthodox directions.

“Ed deserves far more credit than he's got," counters one of his senior aides. "A lot of pro-David [Miliband] commentators were predicting total meltdown. But every single hurdle that's been put in his way - fratricide, factionalism, Red Ed, lack of steel, inability to take on the Tories, inability to win an argument, inability to perform at PMQs - he's got over. This is part of a long, long game."

He has established broad ideological positions on "the squeezed middle, on life beyond the bottom line [the Blue Labour agenda] and on the next generation and the British promise". (The British promise is the idea that each generation will do better than the one before it.) "We were mocked for using the term squeezed middle - remember the Today programme interview - but it's been an agenda-setting victory for us." Quite so.

The challenge ahead

As our leader in last week's New Statesman said, some success in the latest elections is vital for Miliband if he is to unite the party. However, if the Scottish National Party, cunningly led by Alex Salmond, holds on to power, and if the AV referendum is won by the No campaign, Miliband will have suffered two defeats before he has served a year as leader. Even if Labour wins as many as 1,000 seats in the council elections in England - the least that can be expected, his critics say, given how dismally the party polled in the elections of 2007 - there is still a pervading sense, unfair or otherwise, that Miliband and Labour should be doing much better, especially when opposing a government that is rolling back the frontiers of the state at a pace not attempted even by Margaret Thatcher at her most belligerent, and with the Liberal Democrats so unpopular.

There is no organised discontent against Miliband, nor as yet any inchoate challenge. But there is a powerful debate taking place about the future direction of the party, as there should be after the profound defeat of 2010. "This is where we must be in a year," says one prominent supporter of his brother. "Ken [Livingstone] will need to beat Boris [Johnson] in London, and we will need to be at least 15 points ahead in the polls. If we're not, and the economy begins to pick up, we're in deep trouble."