David Miliband
The word that is most often used about David Miliband in relation to the Labour leadership is ‘credible’, largely thanks to his experience as foreign secretary under Gordon Brown from June 2007 until May 2010. But it is another word, earned during his career before he took over the foreign office, that still haunts him and may yet topple him from his current position as bookies’ favourite: ‘Blairite’. The older Miliband brother (44) made his name serving Tony Blair as head of the Number Ten Policy Unit – where Alastair Campbell nicknamed him ‘Brains’ on account of his brilliant but wonkish grasp of policy detail – until Blair persuaded him to stand for Parliament in 2001. Blair began promoting Miliband up the ministerial ladder and, after awarding him with the post of environment secretary in 2006, singled him out as the ‘Wayne Rooney’ of his Cabinet (an accolade bestowed well before the real Rooney’s performance at the recent world cup). After this point, Miliband was seen by many Blairites as the next leader, but when it came to the succession, unstoppable momentum was behind Brown. Miliband has since said he was “not ready to be prime minister” then, but the media nonetheless labelled him a ‘bottler’. This was exacerbated when, after Labour disastrously lost the Glasgow East by-election to the SNP in July 2008, Miliband wrote a controversial article in the Guardian that attacked the Conservatives but made no mention of Brown. Heading into the party’s annual conference, outriders to Miliband and a media pack baying for blood expected the foreign secretary to challenge. But he did not, and he remained publicly loyal to, if slightly detached from, the Brown premiership to the end.
In reality, Miliband is a much more complicated and interesting politician than the crude Blairite label suggests. The son of the famous Marxist philosopher Ralph, Miliband, like his brother, is of the Labour movement in a way that Blair never was. John Smith appointed him, aged 27, as secretary of his Commission on Social Justice. And Miliband would later be the only Cabinet minister to tell Blair to halt Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, though he is now the only candidate to defend the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
On public services, he is traditionally seen as being in favour of Blairite reforms, but, for example, as schools minister he oversaw a crucial agreement bringing 250,000 teachers’ assistants into schools with the assent of the teaching unions. Of the new government’s proposed cuts, he has said that his priority is ensuring that “the innocent who benefit from public services or work for public services don’t pay for the sins of the people who were running the financial services at the time of the economic crisis in 2008”.
