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Jon Cruddas is celebrating a victory over David Miliband as Gordon Brown backs his ideas to refresh Labour’s withered grassroots before new figures showing that the party’s membership has reached a new low.

His much-imitated campaign was paid its most handsome compliment at the weekend when it emerged that Mr Brown is planning to adopt many of the internal reforms that the Dagenham MP has placed at the centre of his campaign to become Labour’s deputy leader.

In an interview with The Times, the sole backbench challenger could not hide his delight to have triumphed over those who suggested that declining membership and activity did not matter in modern politics.

“A Cabinet minister had said to me that the future belongs to a virtual party,” he said.

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He laughs at — but does not deny — the suggestion that the minister was David Miliband.

Mr Cruddas said that while some believe that political parties would in the future “mediate a message to swing voters in swing seats via the internet”, he wanted to concentrate on “real campaigns, real people and real communities”.

He said: “I think Gordon Brown has signalled that he is looking forward to the latter rather than the former and that is a key victory in a debate that has been going on beneath the radar.”

He was speaking before the publication of figures that are expected to show that Labour’s membership fell from 198,000 to 182,000 during the course of last year and reached just 177,000 a month ago — well under half the 407,000 peak when Labour came to power ten years ago.

Mr Cruddas was the least well-known of the candidates at the start of the race. His campaign managers are confident that he will overhaul most, if not all, of his more famous colleagues when the result is announced in ten days’ time.

Whatever the result, being “beneath the radar” is no longer an option for Mr Cruddas, who faces the unusual prospect of being given a ministerial job only if he loses (he has forsworn any government position as deputy leader).

Hustings veterans say that audiences respond to his unspun, natural style. He says that he does not own an iPod and is more embarrassed to admit that he listens to “rare groove” cassettes than that he does so in his Land Rover Freelander.

Frankness, a hallmark of the Cruddas campaign, is, of course, easier for the only candidate who says that he does not want a government job if he wins. The quality has been deployed heavily on the issue of Iraq, where he goes farther than his rivals in saying that he was wrong to vote for the war.

He said that Mr Brown had begun to “nudge forward” a process of reconciliation over Iraq by acknowledging that mistakes were made before the conflict. But he appeared to suggest that the Chancellor should step up efforts to “rehabilitate” Britain’s foreign policy to enable a speedy intervention in Darfur.

“The stakes are high, the body count continues to rise — there’s an imperative to act,” he said, adding that there was a debate to be had on sending the Armed Forces to help in the region either through bases in Chad or on a a carrier in the Mediterranean.