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“There are all sorts of sensible reasons not to run for the White House,” says Larry Sanders, aged 81, the cautious older brother of US presidential hopeful Bernie, 74. “Bernard wouldn’t have stood if he didn’t think it was necessary.”

Across the world people are “feeling the Bern” and heralding a political revolution brought to them by Democratic presidential candidate Sanders, and his British based brother is taking the blame. “I used to babysit him and talk about the political books I was reading, so it’s my fault,” he jokes in a low rumble of a voice that is similar to Bernie’s.

Bernie has taken America and Hillary Clinton by surprise, winning Tuesday night’s primary in New Hampshire with 82 per cent of women under 30 supporting him, and coming close in Iowa last week, with 46.9 per cent of the vote, compared with Clinton’s 49.9.

It reflects a global polarisation of politics, with young people rallying behind socialist underdogs. Over here we have Jeremy Corbyn’s army of hipsters and in the US Bernie is big with the under-30s. “There are comparisons with Corbyn and if Bernard wins we will have a special relationship with him,” says Larry.

Thanks to Bernie, Larry is voting in the US elections this year for the first time since 1968, when he left Brooklyn for Hammersmith with his first wife, Margaret, who died in 1983.

He now lives with his partner Janet in Oxford, where he worked as a county councillor and social worker. Larry has a “Bernie” sticker on his fridge at home and tries to speak to his brother every other Sunday. Last autumn Larry spent five weeks campaigning with Bernie — “it was exciting to be part of the discussions about strategy changes”.

So why are young people supporting older socialist men? “There must be a reason why young people are going to the Left. Middle-aged people have some stability and security whereas younger people trying to get started find that the system isn’t working for them. The biggest similarity between Corbyn and Bernard is their approach to austerity; the idea that the crimes of the bankers in the 2008 crash should be paid for by reducing benefits of poor people and breaking up the NHS.”

Is it relevant that Sanders and Corbyn are both old and white? “They are a factor but no one thinks you should be elected just because of one factor. Clinton doesn’t think someone should be elected just because they are female.”

He continues: “People like my brother and Corbyn developed their ideas in their younger years and stuck to them, whereas people like Hillary Clinton were more cautious and are mired in what’s gone wrong. Part of it has to do with the number of people who feel the political system hasn’t worked for them and in that sense there is a similarity between support for Bernard and Trump.”

Sanders’s rival Hillary Clinton is “a capable woman” but “she is geared to the politics where you shift your views to accommodate what is popular in the polls and as a result she has been involved in some dangerous and unpleasant things.” He talks about her involvement in changing benefit provisions and the war in Iraq.

His brother is interested in Thomas Piketty’s message that economic inequality has increased but hasn’t read Piketty’s book — “he isn’t terribly interested in theory, he is trying to make a practical difference. His friend asked him about Piketty and he said you got 30 seconds to explain it.” This philosophy extends to Twitter, where he is “quick-minded”.

Larry doesn’t fancy Corbyn’s chances here. “It is unlikely that he will be Prime Minister. The established Labour Party would sooner lose than give up control. He would be the best Prime Minister of any party leader except Caroline Lucas.” Larry stood as a Green Party candidate for Oxford and West Abingdon in the general election last year, coming fifth. His brother supported him via Skype at a meeting. “I should have asked his advice because he was better at running than me. Next time.”

Bernie “wasn’t keen to stand”. “He was talking about it for a year before he announced and if anyone had come in with similar politics he would have been happy to let them stand, say Elizabeth Warren [the academic and senator for Massachusetts].” His greatest fear wasn’t the attention — “he is a tough cookie who can cope with being humiliated” — but “if he ran and did it badly then nobody with those kind of ideas could win, they would be damaged and people who need those ideas will be damaged”.

He told his brother a week before he announced his candidacy. “It was very emotional,” says Larry. “It made me think of how proud our parents would be.” Their mother, Dorothy, died aged 46 when Bernie was 18 and Larry 24. Their father died three years later.

He calls his brother Bernard, which is their maternal grandfather’s name. “He was Bernie from the beginning of his political career and I tried it but it felt wrong.”

The Sanders brothers grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Bernie is the first Jewish-American to win a primary. Their father came over aged 17, not speaking a word of English, and became a paint salesman. Larry says: “We lived in a small apartment but were not deprived in any sense of the word.” They weren’t ambitious. “The only thing we knew was that we didn’t want to work for somebody else. That might have been a premonition for Bernard. He has never worked for anybody.”

After the initial “disappointment” of his brother being too small to play, they became friends. “Bernard was a sweet child. He was a little too truthful and gullible. He came home from school and said his friend told him about Martians, and his friend would not have lied to him. But he was a quick learner.”

He was popular and a good athlete; even now he “has kept his figure, weighing almost the same as he did at 18”. They went to musicals together but “he was slow with girls, like his brother. He is puritanical about drink, although he isn’t teetotal, but he did smoke pot.”

Their parents spoke about losing their families in the Holocaust and “it made a big impression. That people you would have been friends with were killed just for being Jewish meant we were aware of an underlying sense of politics. A kind of politics in the sense that a lot of children grow up to think politics is someone else’s problem and not interesting but we knew it was life and death.”

There was “a glimmer” of political promise, when Larry saw his brother speak on a student politics panel and “I have some idea where his values came from” but “I don’t know when he became capable of not minding even fierce opposition. He acquired the capacity to speak out vigorously even if he was going to have everyone coming down hard on him.”

It will be useful if he becomes president. “If he wins he will come up against the whole political and economic establishment.” Barack Obama, who is more moderate, has struggled to implement his healthcare reforms. “It will be a tough job. He won’t wait for politics to change, he’s going try to make it change so he will be in many ways a perpetual campaigner.”

He adds: “Bernie has said it will not solve anything but it will be the first stage in what he is calling a political revolution. It will only work if people remain engaged after the election. It may be that the country has gone too far towards what he called an oligopoly, where a small number of people use their power and money to control the political structure. But it is worth a shot because it is wrong to have people in rich countries suffering when the country can afford to help them.”

He says his brother’s programmes — including a living wage of $15 an hour, universal healthcare and a renewables infrastructure project to create new jobs — are “possible and will make a big difference. The consequences of not doing them will be bad.”

Larry has faith in his brother. “Selection is the hardest part but the way things have gone in the last couple of weeks leads me to think he can do it. The general election is easier.”

Polls give Sanders, who is also senator of Vermont, a 40 per cent chance of winning the nomination. What if he loses? “He will fight to the end. If loses, he has a job that he loves so it won’t be the end of the world.

“I don’t think much will come of Mrs Clinton having shifted her ideas to accommodate his because given the opportunity she will shift in another direction, but this large core of young people supporting him will carry on and make politics an important part of their life.”

Both brothers’ “greatest pleasure is the grandchildren”. Larry’s daughter Anna is 43 and son Jacob is 46. Bernie has a son called Levi and three step-children. Bernie’s house in Vermont is “modest, if it were up to him he’d have nothing on the walls. His wife is increasingly interested in furniture” but he has a huge garden — “even if he wasn’t busy he wouldn’t weed it”.

He enjoys walking in the countryside and does the food shopping, going for organic, and “his culinary skill is barbecuing — he cooks steak”. He reads political biographies and history; like Corbyn, he enjoys folk music “but he is unmusical”. Rapper Killer Mike recently proclaimed his support for him and while Bernie “he thinks he’s a great guy” he isn’t familiar with his work.

Larry is too settled to move back to the US but “I’ll accept an offer to stay at the White House. We could do a barbecue, they have a nice garden.”

Follow Susie on Twitter: @susannahbutter