Ed Miliband has lived for much of his life in the shadow of his brother, David. Not any more, writes Mark Hennessy
FOR SOME, Ed Miliband is a bundle of contradictions. The man who followed his older brother through the same courses in school and college and later as a Labour special adviser before becoming an MP and a Cabinet minister: talented, likeable, but famously indecisive; yet ruthless enough, in the end, to deprive his elder sibling of the post the latter believed was his.
Miliband is part of Labour’s aristocracy. Born in 1969 to left-wing intellectual parents, Ralph and Marion, he is four years younger than David. Both inhaled the political atmosphere in the family’s Primrose Hill home in north London, playing a Trotskyite card game under the table as their parents debated the points of the day with Tony Benn, the African National Congress’ Joe Slovo and others.
He went to Haverstock Comprehensive secondary school, Labour’s “Eton”. There he was a classmate of ex-Labour MP Oona King, who lost out this week in the race to be Labour’s candidate in the mayoralty elections in London: “Oona was too cool to hang around me in school. She is still too cool, some say,” he told a Labour’s women’s event yesterday morning.
In his one and only job outside of the political world, he later got a job as a television researcher, working with journalist and broadcaster Andrew Rawnsley before he was hand-picked by Harriet Harman, now Labour’s deputy leader, who rang Rawnsley seeking a reference for him. In time, he moved to working for Gordon Brown.
During Brown’s Treasury years, Miliband was one of the few inside the heart of New Labour who sought to manage the bitter tensions between Brown and Tony Blair that often threatened to derail the enterprise, becoming known by the Blairites in Number 10 as “the emissary from Planet F***”.
A safe seat in Doncaster followed in 2005, where, in the words of local party members, he made them feel good about themselves, but rarely asked them to consider unpalatable matters, before he joined the Cabinet as climate change secretary in 2007.
His legacy in office is doubted, with some believing his role during the Copenhagen climate change talks last year was over-stated, not least by himself. This year he wrote the party’s much-criticised election manifesto. Today, he doubts much of its contents.
From now on, Ed Miliband is no longer sibling to a more famous brother, Mili-E, Miliband The Younger, or any of a dozen other monikers. He is Ed Miliband, leader of Labour and leader of the Opposition. For good, or ill, he no longer stands in the shade cast by anyone else.