It was an extraordinary photograph, taken in extraordinary circumstances, which cast a surprising new light on a public figure. An aspiring young photographer called Naomi Goggin captured David Miliband and his wife Louise on the day last month that he announced he wouldn’t be standing for Labour’s front bench after being defeated by his younger brother in the leadership contest.

Miss Goggin, 24, who also works as a waitress, snapped the Milibands in the living room of their North London home. The couple were sitting in front of a painting they bought to mark the former Foreign Secretary’s 40th birthday – an £800 portrait of 13 naked dancing women by a local artist called Michelle Dovey.

Miss Goggin’s image – reproduced here – won her a Times Young Photographer Of The Year Award. But for the Milibands and artist Mrs Dovey, a 38-year-old mother of two, its publication this week resulted in ferocious attacks on their artistic taste and talents.

David Lee, editor of the art newspaper The Jackdaw, said: ‘There is no way I would have that on my wall. It looks as if it ought to be in a pole-dancing club rather than the home of the British Foreign Secretary.' Author and self-styled cultural critic Stephen Bayley was even more vitriolic in The Daily Telegraph. ‘Who does not get a chilling thrill of horror at the sight of The Miliband Painting?’ he wrote.

‘In my own case, the coldly curdled blood is mixed with a delicious voyeur’s sense of delight at the discovery of a hitherto secret (and very horrible) family indiscretion. A bit like finding a severed head in the linen basket, a gun in the bathroom cabinet, a whip in the downstairs loo.’

Mr Bayley goes on to describe the painting as ‘middle-brow junk’, ‘bad bad art’ and ‘one of those decisions possibly made after lunch’. ‘It exists to confer sophistication – there are nudes! There is vigorous brushwork! We are worldly bohemians! – but in fact confers the very opposite.’His final judgment: ‘Politicians shouldn’t mess with art.’So what does Mr Miliband, 45, have to say? Here, in an exclusive article for The Mail on Sunday, he gives his own, equally trenchant riposte . . .