The reinvention of Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband is back, but he admits some people will be wondering: why? The man who beat his elder brother in the most famous episode of political fratricide in British history, then led the Labour party to catastrophic election defeat, helpfully suggests how our interview to discuss his return to the frontline might be framed: “Relic or relevant? That could be your headline!”

Five years in the political wilderness have sharpened Miliband’s appetite. Restored to Labour’s top team, the man dubbed “Red Ed” by the tabloids has been handed the job of designing the party’s future for a post-Covid British economy, with a brief covering business and climate change. Miliband, 50, insists that the world is a very different place from that harrowing night in 2015 when he left the political stage in despair. “Reforming capitalism is tough and there is big resistance to it,” he says. “But I think the mood has changed.”

He contends that while the financial crash was an insufficient trigger for fundamental change, the social angst exposed by Brexit and the fragility of a global system laid bare by the coronavirus crisis have transformed the political landscape. He is convinced that Britain is now ready to embrace his vision of an active state working in “partnership” with the private sector and driving a green revolution. “The notion that the state just gets out of the way and that will then make for success — that has been buried by this crisis,” he says. “We’ve seen the state and business working together necessarily.” 

Perceptions of Miliband have also undergone a transformation in the past few years. He admits the pressures of the Labour leadership turned him into something of an automaton. He was widely portrayed as a hapless figure apparently unable to eat a bacon sandwich and whose idea of a good stunt was to carve a series of pledges on to a 9ft slab of lime, gleefully dubbed the “EdStone” by the media.

But today, in a video interview from his north London home, he is all animation — his arms appear to be in permanent motion — self-deprecating and jokey, sprinkling our conversation with expletives. “What kind of fucking question is that?” he expostulates at one point.

Reforming capitalism is tough and there is big resistance to it. But I think the mood has changed

“It feels strange how much everything has changed,” says Abby Tomlinson, who started the ­“Milifandom” movement to counter his portrayal in the media in 2015, when she was a sixth-form student (fittingly, she now works in communications). “Now people see him as someone who is up for a laugh, who can make a joke. He’s got good, intelligent ideas and has a wealth of knowledge and experience.”

But is that really enough for Miliband’s second coming to have a significant impact? 

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A Miliband renaissance of any kind seemed highly improbable in May 2015, when he resigned as Labour leader after taking the party to a disastrous defeat that incurred a net loss of seats on just 30 per cent of the vote. “I was mildly disappointed,” he says with an ironic smile. “OK, I was pretty devastated. It was also, I felt, devastating for the country.”

In his place the party picked the far-left rank outsider Jeremy Corbyn, a consequence in part of a decision Miliband made to allow grassroots members more say over the choice of leader. As Labour headed deeper into its ideological — and electorally barren — comfort zone, Miliband went off to see friends in Australia, growing a beard and reflecting on his failure. 

He takes little comfort from the fact that after he stepped down, Conservative leaders Theresa May and Boris Johnson moved on to Labour’s turf to adopt some of his policies, including an energy price cap and more active state intervention, higher public spending and regional activism. “Vindication doesn’t do much for me,” he says.

Corbyn famously responded to his decisive election defeat last year by claiming he had “won the argument” but Miliband is not about to follow suit. “I take responsibility for having lost that [2015] election,” he says. “The notion that the show was great but the audience was poor is not one that I subscribe to. I think that I wasn’t bold enough . . . [that] there was more of an appetite for change than I perhaps realised.”

Instead, he pursued a soft-left agenda promising to take on economic “predators”, to rein in privatised monopolies and to undertake some limited redistribution. He was unable to dent the central message of David Cameron’s Conservative party that the country needed more austerity to sort out the mess left by the financial crash, or to expose the danger posed to the economy by Cameron’s pledge of a Brexit referendum, a policy opposed by Labour.

“There was modest social democratic reform, which is essentially what I was offering, versus the gamble of the European referendum,” he says. “A paper like the FT preferred the gamble and I think quite a lot of business preferred the gamble. They underestimated the gamble, I think.”

He admits there were aspects of the top job he didn’t handle well. “I think there’s something about being the leader of the Labour party which imposes big pressures and I think I probably succumbed too much.” He says he was “robotic” at times, desperately trying to look like a prime-minister-in-waiting, warily viewing every bacon sandwich as a disaster waiting to happen.

Yet, even in the aftermath of defeat, Miliband “never really thought about leaving politics”. He decided not to follow his father Ralph Miliband, the renowned Marxist academic, into an ivory tower and instead returned to the back benches as MP for Doncaster North. And then, rather against everybody’s expectations, something remarkable happened. “The public discovered I had a personality,” he smiles, his hands pushing deep into his slightly greying hair.

The notion that the state just gets out of the way has been buried by this crisis

As Miliband was about to be reminded, there is nothing the British public loves more than a loser. Where previously his academic air and occasionally goofy looks had proved an electoral liability, now they combined with a waspish and hitherto-suppressed sense of humour to create a more intriguing package. One of the earliest signs of this reinvention came in 2017 when, with the broadcaster Geoff Lloyd, Miliband launched the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast, an affable look at political ideas, on which he owns a made-up dog called “Chutney”, and even burst into a rendition of “We All Stand Together” by Paul McCartney & The Frog Chorus. According to Miliband, the podcast pulls in 60,000-80,000 listeners a week.  

Other offers started to come in from unlikely places, Miliband recalls, including a proposed reality-TV show where “you had to get fit and then show your fit bod”. He turned that down, along with opportunities to appear on other shows such as Drive, Dancing on Ice and — he archly notes — the “after-show” party on I’m a Celebrity. “Oh, and Celebrity Bake Off.” As he reels off the list, Miliband sounds relieved that the public eventually got to see another side of him. The demands of leading Labour had, he says tactfully, put him “in a certain space with a certain persona, which can be problematic”.

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Miliband’s spell in charge of Labour ended badly, but it began in the bitterest of circumstances too. It was the fag end of the New Labour era, as the party’s 13-year dominance of British politics came to an end, when he succeeded Gordon Brown on September 25 2010. On a day of agonising drama, he unexpectedly beat his elder brother David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, to take the party crown.

The rictus smile on the beaten brother’s face told of a family torn apart by ambition. David left the country to work for the International Rescue Committee, an NGO in New York, where he remains a decade on. Meanwhile, some on the Blairite wing of the Labour party, who saw David as their continuity candidate, have never forgiven Ed, who was regarded as very much the junior of the two siblings in both age and experience. “He was perhaps the most ill-suited, miscast, frightened, unskilled, lacking-in-judgment leader in Labour’s history,” says one former Labour minister.

Miliband’s critics continue to hold him accountable for what they view as five wasted years under Corbyn, who benefited from a Miliband reform that saw Labour leaders elected under “one member, one vote” with people able to register as supporters for £3 and vote.

“There is an enormous warmth in the party for Ed Miliband but many still blame him for the rule changes that led to Corbynism, and for failing to stand up to the advances of the left when he was leader,” says Paul Richards, co-founder of Blairite campaign group Progress.

As Miliband sat out the Corbyn years, some in the party’s mainstream believed he should have been more forceful in his criticism of his successor, particularly of the way in which anti-Semitism was allowed to flourish during his tenure. “They were very bad times for our party,” admits Miliband, who is the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. “I think Jeremy himself acknowledged he was too slow to get a grip on it.” 

He says he did speak out, but confirms that anti-Semitism was not the reason he did not serve in the Corbyn team, and that he did consider doing so. “It was more the time just wasn’t right. When you do a job like being the leader, it takes it out of you.”

Miliband is currently serving on a party review into why Labour lost last year’s election so heavily, but says some conclusions are already obvious. “There’s a whole host of factors . . . and I think — just like my leadership was an issue in 2015 — so Jeremy’s was in 2019.” He admits Brexit was also a factor, and there were “real doubts about the deliverability of what we were saying”.

While Miliband underwent his personal reinvention, the political debate on issues such as the environment also seemed to move back in his direction. A cabinet minister for climate change in the last Labour government, he believes that Covid-19 could be the trigger for a green revolution in the UK. “This crisis supercharges things and underlines the need for us to go faster. We need to put young people back to work. What people can do, in terms of green energy and nature, is an absolute core of that in my view.”

His decision to return to the front bench in April, when new Labour leader Keir Starmer offered him the post of shadow business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, reflects this belief that Britain is on the cusp of great change. He argues that the cumulative effect of the 2008 financial crash, the public dissatisfaction with the status quo expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the convulsions caused by Covid-19 make profound reform unavoidable, and says the state has a key role to play. He cites the example of retraining laid-off Rolls-Royce aircraft engine-makers: “They could be incredibly useful to the future of our renewables industry.”

Miliband is also an admirer of Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions whom he encouraged to stand for parliament back in 2015 and whom he describes as “an incredibly decent bloke with incredibly good values”. And yet he admits, “I had to think hard about coming back now, in truth, because my last experience of the frontline was pretty full-on”.

He adds that his wife, high-court judge Justine Thornton, “might agree with that description”. Their sons Sam and Daniel are aged nine and 11 respectively. “These are pretty critical years. I wouldn’t recommend losing an election but one of the virtues for me was that it allowed me to be a proper father and husband. So these are difficult dilemmas. But I’m glad I decided to come back.”

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So Ed Miliband is back. Whether he can help Labour overhaul an 80-seat Tory majority at the next election to implement any of the above ideas remains a huge question. “I think it’s a big mountain to climb, we shouldn’t be under any illusions about that,” he says. “But I think this is a moment of reassessment. You’ve got to go out and make your arguments and see where we are.”

He believes that under Starmer’s leadership, there is at least a prospect of the party presenting a united front at the next election after five years of “incredibly damaging factionalism”. “Most people say, ‘Let’s bury our differences,’” he adds. “We’re good at burying our similarities.”

I think — just like my leadership was an issue ın 2015 — so Jeremy’s was in 2019

So far Starmer has made it his mission to appear statesmanlike and to sideline the Corbynites without trumpeting the fact. The new Labour leader, like Miliband, believes soft-left social democracy will strike a chord with voters who can see the state coming to their rescue in the face of a pandemic.

Peter Mandelson, a leading Blairite, fears that Labour may be about to make a huge strategic mistake. “People can see the difference between emergency measures and normal times,” he says. “We would be fooling ourselves if we thought the country, as a result of the Covid experience, is now ready for some ideological project to usher in state control of the economy.”

But Stewart Wood, who was Miliband’s consigliere during his leadership, says his former boss has come through the “brutal” experience of election defeat and his moment has now arrived. “Ed spent his time as leader of the opposition trying to get rewriting the rules of our economy up in lights . . . It wasn’t enough for us to win in 2015. But the Covid crisis has made the question of rebuilding our economy the central question of the next few years.”

As for the most famous sibling rivalry in British politics, Miliband says that relations with his elder brother are healing. “He’s in New York — we talk quite a lot. We talk about my mum, we talk about the world, we talk about the pandemic. It happened a long time ago.”

Indeed, it is easy to see Ed Miliband’s own time in the furnace of British politics as ancient history. The pre-Brexit, pre-Covid era seems a lifetime ago; contemporaries such as Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg are long gone.

But he insists that he is still relevant, not a relic. “There’s this Milton Friedman line about when a crisis hits, it’s the ideas that are lying around that get picked up”. Miliband’s gamble is that his career, like his ideas, can yet be retrieved from the floor.

George Parker is the FT’s political editor. Jim Pickard is the FT’s chief political correspondent

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