Just watched David Miliband spend the morning of his 42nd birthday enduring Andrew Marr on BBC’s Sunday A.M. talk show. It’s part of the 24-hour scrub-down Miliband has been doing to rid the government of the stain left by Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown’s bizarre pronouncement late last week that the UK would soon part ways with the US.

In his first interview (with the Telegraph) as a government minister, Malloch Brown announced that Britain would be pursuing a more “impartial” foreign policy, one built on “coalitions that are lateral, which go beyond the bilateral”–whatever that means–and that the US and the UK would no longer be “joined at the hip.”

Marr asked Miliband if maybe Malloch Brown was just talking about distancing the UK from the “neocons in Washington”–despised by Malloch Brown (for reasons explained by Claudia Rosett here, Mark Steyn here, and Nile Gardiner here) and characterized by Marr as “a group of individuals who have done much to spread destruction around the world.”

Miliband simply explained that Malloch Brown had a “very specific” brief at the Foreign Office. He even spelled it out, in case Malloch Brown was watching (and he definitely was): Malloch Brown’s beat was “Asia, Africa, and UN reform.” Nothing else. It was a pretty straightforward rebuke to his lordship, who was brought on as a junior minister to play, in his own typically immodest words, the role of “the wise eminence behind the young Foreign Secretary.” Today, he certainly looks very much the eminence grease.

Miliband went on to reiterate that US-UK relations under Tony Blair would be unchanged under Gordon Brown. All in all a good Miliband performance, as usual.