135. Ed Miliband: Blair, Brown, and Battling his Brother (Part 1)

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1:51Welcome to The Restless Politics Lead It with me, Hey Rory Stewart. And me Alistair Campbell. And we're with Ed Miliband. And I'm delighted to say we're going to be with Ed Miliband for some time. We're going to do two parts. And the first part essentially will be his life growing up in a very, very political family. Then his career through politics. His relationship with his brother, which became somewhat Shakespearean at a certain point in their lives. When they both fought for the leadership of the Labour Party. his experience as a cabinet minister and then as leader of the Labour Party. And that's going to be the first part.

2:27And then the second part, how he recovered from defeat, his decision to stay in politics, and now with one of the most significant jobs in the cabinet, under Keir Starmer as Secretary of State for Climate, Energy Security and Net Zero. So there's an awful lot to talk about. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure. Well done on your podcast. Well, you used to present the UK's number one political podcast for a while. I used to be a podcaster, and Alistair used to say to Fiona, why does Ed go on about his effing podcast all the time? Can I get to the bottom of Alistair saying he's known you for a long time?

3:04Because we have this kind of vision of you with Tony Benn helping you with your homework and all these sort of grand figures knowing you when you were a child. He didn't know you when you were that young, right? No. No, no. But Ed and I were both there together kind of around the start of New Labour. Ed very much identified as Gordon's man and me very much as Tony's man. But Ed, we'll come on to that. We'll come on to that. Let's start, though, with your childhood. You've got two very, very, very interesting parents. So just tell us a little bit about them, their background, and the influence they had, you and David.

3:40Yeah, so both my parents were Jewish refugees. My dad, born in Belgium, left in 1940 with his father just before the Nazis arrived, walked from Brussels to Ostend and took a boat to Britain. And how old was he then? 16. So I was born in 1924. My mum, a Jewish refugee from Poland who was in hiding in Poland during the war, after the war lost her father in a concentration camp. It's such a defining part of who I think both David and I are. And it's such an extraordinary life that they, an upbringing that they had in such a dislocated and traumatic time. We didn't talk about it much growing up. It's got so many different implications, the trauma, I think also the belief in human goodness, because my mother only survived the war because of a lady who took in my grandma my mum and my aunt in england in no no in in in warsaw it was really this family the tzitkovsky family and and the the son who as he then was who was sort of 14 15 at the time and was part of the the resistance just recent very recently died and he's an amazing he was an amazing guy who i'd met and again i took my family to meet him um but but you know it was the heroism of people like that that meant that my mum survived the war.

5:19Your father came then to Britain when he was 16. Yeah. What did that mean in terms of his relationship to Britain? Did he speak completely fluent English from straight, from before he was 16? Did he learn it when he was there? I think he must, he learned it really when he came. I think he must have had some English, but he learned it when he came. He arrived as Adolf, his mother in her infinite lack of wisdom, decided to call him Adolf in 1924. And his landlady in Britain said, you can't be called Adolf. You can have to change your name to Ralph. So he was from then on Ralph. He went to night school.

5:57He learned English. He then joined the Royal Navy and was actually at the Normandy landings. He was what they call the chief petty officer. So he was the person trying to translate the German communication. And he spoke French and German as well. He must have spoken German, so that's how he was able to do that, yeah. I think he always had an incredible sort of gratitude, I think, for the fact that Britain took him in and eventually, and his father, and then he obviously settled here. and he always talked very glowingly about his time in the Royal Navy and the sort of camaraderie of it and sort of what it meant.

6:44The other Rory in my life says that my finest moment on television was when I went out to attack the Daily Mail after they called your dad the man who hated Britain. Yes, I know. What was that all like when your... So your dad was a Marxist and he became one of the leading Marxist intellectuals I remember David, your brother, telling me the story about how he used to go and salute Karl Marx's grave at Highgate Cemetery. Did he ever take you a look? I'm not sure salute. Well, salute as in pay tribute. He didn't like the grave, actually. No, he thought it was awful, actually. Too big? Too sort of garish and horrible.

7:22Yeah, it wasn't his thing. He is himself buried in Highgate Cemetery, but it wasn't his thing, really. But when you were growing up, and as Rory said, you grew up in a very political household. You know, Joe Sloan from the anti-apartheid movement was popping in and Tony Benn. Did you always have a sense of politics being the most important thing in life? Yeah. I think politics is almost too narrow a way of putting it. I think, look, for them, you hear a lot from people today, politics doesn't make any difference. For them, it made, you know, it turned their life upside down. It killed my mother's father, my grandfather.

8:06It killed many members of my dad and mom's family. So I think that really what happened was that they felt lucky and sort of blessed that they had survived. And I think that then gave them a sense of you have a duty to try and make the world a better place, to use the time you've got to try and make the world a better place. So I think it wasn't sort of das Kapital for breakfast, but it was more sort of lunch. It was just more a sense of a sort of responsibility to the world. And also their community was these extraordinary people about, you know, you mentioned Ruth First and Joe Slovo. Ruth First was an anti-apartheid activist who was killed by the South African government.

8:57I met her just some months before she was killed. She was killed in a letter bomb sent to Mozambique. and you know this was their community of people and uh so so it was sort of infused in the blood stream in a way um i think just to sort of put on the record clearly your politics is very different from your father's and your father um was somebody who had a deep affection for britain and um as you say served in the royal navy but i i wonder whether it's possible to step back from that mad sort of slander in the Daily Mail to you reflecting a little bit on his politics rather than yours and what that was like for him coming out of the Second World War.

9:41Because he clearly, and it's a theme we keep returning to in the podcast, some people came out of the end of the Second World War, particularly kind of liberal Americans thinking that the solution was liberal democracy, capitalism, rules-based international order, and all the stuff that we talked about from 1989 onwards. Your father drew a different conclusion from his experience of the war and what he thought a just society could be. Can we focus on that while absolutely accepting that's not your politics, but I'd be interested in how he saw the world? I think it's interesting because it's complicated because sort of Marxist in a way, for him, Marxism was an analysis of society rather than a prescription.

10:24It was an analysis of society based on class and class division. He used to describe it as a tool to think about society. And if you think about communism as it was practiced, he was very skeptical about it. He was never a member of the Communist Party. But his vision was a sort of, you know, vision based on large scale public ownership, a much more egalitarian society. And so it was in a sort of Marxist tradition. But it's, you know, he was a member of the Labour Party at one point. um ian micado some people will listeners will know a big figure in the labor party was very close to him and i think in the 50s um and then he got fed up with the labor party and you know so yearned for a a very different society and he tried to give expression to that um and and i suppose again for contemporary listeners you and your brother david are very much associated with new labor which for some people on the tony ben side of the labor party was quite a kind of radical departure.

11:32Did you feel a sort of tension or an issue in departing from your father's vision of politics towards a sort of more social democratic vision of politics? Yes. I think that the sort of distinction I would draw, and it was a distinction that he was quite open to, I think, which is, you know, the pragmatic practice of what you can actually achieve in your own generation, in your own lifetime, in the actually existing messy world of politics versus more utopian visions of what the good society might look like. and I'm not saying well he would have just he was a supporter of new labor I mean he died shortly uh he died sort of around the time that John Smith died so he didn't see new labor but he wouldn't have been a supporter of new labor um but he wasn't one of these people who thought well I'll just have my utopian visions that I'm not going to knock on doors for the labor party I'm not I don't care what happens in a general election I remember he'd be incredibly depressed when the Tories won in 1992, the last general election he saw.

12:44So definitely there's a sort of parting of ways in some senses, but he was very tolerant of people who were trying in the difficulties of actually existing politics to try and sort of bend the curve of what happened. He was quite old when you were born, wasn't he? He was in the well-interested 40s. Hard is hard having old parents. And you were 24 when you died. Yeah. um and so he's now he's he's long past and yeah and now your mother's marion's still with us but she's she's not well um we all know people with alzheimer's but when you're sort of living the life that you're living and you know david spends a long time in in the states just tell us a little bit about what that's like and how you've dealt with that i mean look i think my dad's death was an unbelievably traumatic experience for me um i don't think i realized it at the time that 24 was young for him to die but it felt like he he'd had this heart attack in the early 1970s which obviously i'd when i was really really young didn't really aware it wasn't really aware of and you know i always had a sense i suppose in the back of my mind of his mortality i think he did too and then he had this heart bypass in 1991 which he was he nearly died a number of times afterwards and it was all and and but you know it was a sort of i mean it's like the worst thing that's happened to me in my life and it's like 30 years ago so it feels like such a long time ago but it you know he was such a a kind of lodestar such a sort of presence uh this would be you know it's just unbelievably hard look my mum is still alive she's 90 she's unfortunately got very bad alzheimer's i still see her a lot she lives nearby um really hard i'm really grateful for every day with her though it's interesting i mean my experience of her alzheimer's is incredible it's incredibly sad but even beneath it all she's still got her some of her old personality which I and I really value I was just talking to Justine about this the weekend actually and just saying how much I valued her still being here despite everything so you both you and David went to the same college yes in Oxford yes both studied yes PPE yes and what's what's the gap between you in age four and a half years and you're the you're the only two children yeah and and just so very quick before you come back to honestly it seems from the service quite dutiful that you would have thought that you might rebel against this rather kind of earnest political one of you at least might rebel and go and do something else instead of which.

15:37I mean, was it? It's sort of very interesting. It's like maybe New Labour was the rebellion. No, I don't think so. I think it's a tribute to my parents that they were very – they treated us – this has its downsides – but they treated us as sort of adults when it came to sort of engaging in politics, having views, being an 11-year-old, 12-year-old, 13-year-old. It wasn't like, oh, you're too young to understand that. And maybe today that would be not so out of place, but maybe back then it was sort of different. And was David a good older brother? Yeah, he looked after me, including at school. We went to Haverstock Comprehensive.

16:20He looked out for me. He sort of had his rough moments. Back then? Yeah. Yeah. We'll come on to the rough moments later on. Yeah, yeah. So your first proper job, in quotes, was basically with Harriet Harman. Is that right? My first proper job was actually working at a television program called A Week in Politics. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we did an interview with Harriet Harman, which didn't go so well for her and uh I wait I sort of got to meet her kind of through that interview and then she was looking for somebody to come and work for her and then Gordon basically poached you yes we we we were in the same uh building in seven mil bank um and uh while I was there actually I had this sort of moment when I I was sort of thinking do I really want a career in politics and I went off to do a um what's called a mini pupillage which is to you know go and think about being a barrister for a week and on the fourth day of this mini pupillage I walked into this at lunchtime we went into an Indian restaurant that we the people were going to and there was an evening standard on the table and it said John Smith dead and it was the day that John Smith had died and I suddenly said excuse me I've got to go and I never went back So you went to hire him?

17:39So I went back to hire him. And I was like, okay, well, and then obviously the whole leadership thing transpired. But eventually then I went to work for Gordon a few months later. Right. So I had dinner with Gordon last week and I was really struck by the kind of, the sort of strange kind of craggy charisma of a man and the strange energy of him. How would you describe it, Alistair? I'd delete strange. Just the craggy charisma. I mean, he's a real presence. a kind of great, you know, I was sitting next to him, a great kind of brooding, focused presence with a real views on the world, real vision of the world.

18:15What drew you to him? What did you see in this great kind of bearer of a man? Look, I think it was an extraordinary political apprenticeship working for Gordon and Tony. I think the people who were around Gordon and Tony had the most amazing political training. And what did I learn from Gordon? that intellect and ideas really matter in politics, that it isn't just about some superficial headline. You've got to really think the issues through at a very deep fundamental level. He's a very deep thinker, first of all. Secondly, a sort of sense of political strategy. I don't know anyone who can think for 15 moves ahead in the way that he can.

19:01and thirdly his absolute dogged gogged determination you know he will do the extra meeting the extra phone call you know oh it's not possible there's no point in saying that to gordon he's like well what do you mean it's not possible of course it's possible whether that's a local issue that he campaigns on today in fife or an international you know financial architecture issue. And we might talk about what became known as the TBGBs, but looking back on it, they were like two extraordinary figures to have in a government. And what was Blair like? I think somebody said about him, he tripped the light fantastic.

19:49He had an extraordinary charisma, again, an ability to think strategically, different politics, different politics than me, different politics than Gordon. How different do you think, really? I always thought that was exaggerated a bit. And certainly on this podcast, we never hear about any difference. Their presentation is not true. Tell us what the difference is. The way I think of it is that they were two wings of the aeroplane of the 1997 to, well, 2007, 2010 government. And tell us to wind up, how do you see what the difference between the two wings is? Where was John Prescott? Gordon was the social justice, child poverty, investment redistribution wing that's not to say that tony didn't care about those things and i think tony was more the sort of you know the public service reform you know constitutional reform europe uh wing but that doesn't say that gordon didn't care about those things or tony didn't care about the things that gordon cared about but their emphasis was different i'm trying I'll put this as sort of fairly and objectively as I can.

20:59Do you think back in 94, though, that we picked the right leader? Oh, God. I mean, sure. I mean, you won three elections. And Gordon, when you talk about Gordon's determination and doggedness, do you think there was ever a time when the TBGBs really did become much more about personalities and ambition? You and I had absolute front row seats of this. We were both members of the so-called group of death. Why was it called that? I think it was called... It was after some World Cup thing. Yeah, it was because Scotland, Douglas and I, Douglas and Alexander, both Scotland supporters, Scotland always got the group of death.

21:37We decided to label our meetings the group of death. That was you, Douglas, Ed Balls, me and Philip, and occasionally Tony and Gordon. But most of the time, people did work really well together. And actually, one of the best things is that even though you and I or me and Ed Balls, we'd have fallouts, but basically we worked together. But what do you think it was in the end that made the TBGB such a difficult thing to... Partly personality and partly politics. Look, you're to the left of Tony. No question about it. You were at the time, Fiona certainly is, you were, and you are. We went on this, there was this one famous moment when, Alice knows what I'm going to say, we went on this away day to an advertising agency what was the advertising agency tbwa tbwa and it was a sort of it was 2001 ish um and uh and we sort of it was all sort of what does the government stand for who would and and there was there was one big flaw in this plan which is everybody went including gordon it was the two teams it was sort of partly a bonding exercise and partly what where is the government going exercise the only person who didn't go was tony and there was some awkwardness to it was we all had to sort of sit around in a circle and describe our favourite holiday as a child and Gordon had to do that and all of that and it was like oh my god this is like I want to crawl under the table here but we all came out with an incredibly progressive much more sort of radical view of what the government should stand for Tony then concluded that the government to be taken over by the Marxists and that this was the sort of massive project you remember this is a fair reading isn't it I think I said I think we then had to have a sort of regrouping of this group with Tony involved in it where we all sort of we all got sort of wound back and sort of changed and all that so what was the slogan what sort of slogans were you generating that I can't I think it was so much slogan it was sort of greater focus on fairness yeah yeah big mission yeah I remember Tony afterwards calling in me and Peter Hyland saying you know have you lunatics completely taken over the asylum now and of course you then became I I think it was Bob Shrum, the American speechwriter, who somehow got blamed, or Stan Greenberg, who somehow got blamed for this whole thing.

23:54But I thought it was really interesting because it took out the people from both camps, if you like, and said, look, what is this government still with a majority of 167 or whatever it was? What is it really in power to do? And what it revealed is that without Tony Blair in the room, you were all a bunch of lefties. More lefty, yeah, including him. That was the meeting where we were all asked if we could describe the campaign as a person, who would we choose? And you were like sort of Nelson Mandela. I was Jeff Stelling. And you don't even know who Jeff Stelling is. Jeff Stelling was the Sky Sports commentator.

24:35And they all said, who's Jeff Stelling? He said, he's this amazing guy. Data, detail, strategy, big picture. But that is interesting. Just for a second. My entire experience is he's perpetually mocking me for the fact that I don't know who people like Jeff Stanley is. But he's just revealed that nobody else in the room had any idea who Jeff Stanley was. So his presentation of himself as being representing 99.9 % of humanity know about this stuff. And I don't. Turns out you don't know this stuff either. His presentation of himself is always wild. It's a bit mad. What about, how do you remind our listeners and viewers how you became known as the emissary from Planet Fuck?

25:09Do you remember that one? that's because i was the person who tried to and look i think this is sort of what i hope i try and do is is sort of try and be somebody who sees different points of view i mean i tried to be somebody who helped try and bridge the tbg well you you you coined the phrase so i don't know can you explain though the the language you were an emissary from which planet planet fuck yeah why was it called why does the planet have that well Your memory of this is? My memory is that Ed was the, we decided that Ed was the only member of the team who at the time did not tell us to fuck off every time.

25:47Every time we met. That made me slightly, but certainly he became known as the chemistry from Planet. You didn't mind though, did you? No, I thought it was a compliment. The bridge builder. It was a compliment. So after the second election win, you were around with Gordon as a special advisor, but then you went off. there's only so much time you can do these jobs without burning out but were you already thinking about becoming an mp i wasn't really sure to be honest whether i wanted to or not and i think partly going to harvard and teaching for a bit and doing other things was look do i really want to stick at this and what made what made you answer yes that's sort of in my blood and you know i cared about i remember saying to my dad when i was 18 19 20 i can't remember uh dad you no, I'm not going to be an academic.

26:33It's not really what drives me. What drives me is politics. What drives me is politics. And it wasn't at that point being a politician. And him saying, that's okay. Look, that's obviously fine. And was he a frustrated politician? Would he have liked to be an MP? People used to see him speak and say, you should be a Labour politician and so on. I don't think he was. I think he wouldn't have wanted to do it. And look, The Labour Party wasn't the vehicle for him, as he sort of discovered. And being an academic was what drove him. And in terms of, so obviously, you can present it as these two very dutiful children following these very earnest parents into left-wing politics.

27:18You can also, as Alistair points out, see maybe elements of rebellion. You going more new Labour and him being a Marxist. and potentially also cite rebellion against your brother, who seems more Blairite and you're more Brownite. I mean, did you find that you began to develop a politics that was a little bit different to your brothers and that that was an important part of you becoming an independent human being? I think I always had a slightly different politics. I mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate the differences between us. I was always more sceptical about New Labour, which may be in a way this conversation we just had about the away day the sort of fabled away day i felt that skepticism that they you know this was a massive opportunity to change the country we were a deeply unequal country were we doing enough were we striving hard enough to make those changes that needed to be made and that's what i felt throughout the time and that is by the way you know that's as much about gordon because gordon was obviously the Chancellor, as it is, you know, about Tony.

28:24That isn't to say I don't celebrate the great achievements of the government, but I felt there was more we could do. Give us examples. What are opportunities that looking back you think actually we might have been able to do that? We didn't tackle inequality. Inequality basically stayed more or less the same. Now, I was very involved in the tax credits thing, which was a massive redistributive thing, which was Gordon's signature policy and lifted kids out of poverty and was an absolutely great thing that we did. But the country remained incredibly unequal. The labour market remained incredibly, in my view, still quite exploitative.

29:01I think some of the problems we still see today hark back to some of that. And what were the policy solutions to those things that could have been pushed ahead between 1997 and 2010 that were missed? I think, look, just for example, a greater role for trade unions. I think we were pretty cautious on labor market reform. Taxation at the top. Taxation at the top was sort of verboten, really, until the end, until after the financial crisis. We did redistribution of the proceeds of growth, which is really, really important, but we shied away from taxing more at the top. Well, listen, let's take a break now because we're getting right into the guts of your sort of career as a politician rather than as an advisor and as a young man.

29:47So let's take a quick break and then we'll come back to your political career.

29:54Welcome back to The Rest of the Politics, leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. So, Doncaster. You become MP in Doncaster. Just give, I mean, how did that happen? You got a safe seat. David got a safe seat. Pat McFadden got a safe seat. And you're not actually from Doncaster, right? I'm not, no. You did spend part of your childhood in Leeds, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. I grew up, became a Leeds United fan, a bit lapsed, very lapsed. But you also spent part of your life in the States. I did. I did, definitely. And that's sort of an important part of, you know, me. But when you came back, did you?

30:33So I came back in 2004 to Gordon, a bit on sufferance, if I'm honest. Gordon wanted you back. Yeah, and I was very thinking, partly just, it's just, you know, the jobs as an advisor, I'm sure my advisors are going to be listening to this and thinking, yeah, too right, mate. But, you know, these jobs are absolutely draining of your life. I mean, you know, it was in the days of landlines, but basically, Justin and I talk about this a lot, I used to have to unplug my phone on a Saturday night because I knew that Gordon would be ringing potentially at 7am on Sunday morning. And then when he wouldn't answer, he would ring people that he knew never switched their phone off, such as yours truly to say, have you held from Ed?

31:17Where's Ed? Can't find Ed. Please call Gordon urgent. Please call Gordon very urgent. I mean, the poor pager people, you know, it was these pagers that we used to have to communicate. And it's just like, I just, anyway, so I came back. And then getting a seat was... Yeah, it was really interesting because what happened was that I was not sure that I wanted what I wanted to do. Gordon was incredibly encouraging, you know, to give him full credit. He was incredibly encouraging to me going for a seat. Rosie Winterton, my dear friend, was the MP in Doncaster Central, said, look, Doncaster North, Kevin Hughes, sadly, the existing MP, got ill.

31:55And I said, well, I'm not from Doncaster. And the deputy mayor of Doncaster is going for the seat. And no way I'm going to get this seat. And she said, well, I think it's more open. I think they might want somebody different, you know, try it. So eventually I did try it. And, you know, I had an extraordinary sort of, I think it was three or four weeks, going to meet every party member or as many party members as I could saying, you know, I remember the first conversation I really properly had was the guy who said, look, you're not from here. I don't want you as the MP. And I said, well, look, I'm not from here, but let me explain to you what I think I wanted, what I hope I can do as the MP.

32:33And, you know, after 45 minutes of the conversation, he said, well, OK, I'll meet you. And I thought win or lose that selection. I thought it's been just an amazing experience. And just talking to people about their hopes for the, you know, what had Labour done well, what hadn't it done well, how did the country need to change, all of those things. anyway and then I got I got selected one of the things that you then did is you went on to the backbenchers for a very very short period I mean yeah tell us I mean were you really on the back benchers you actually secretly in number 10 all the time and actually in the central government so you never really experienced what it's like no I was a backbencher you're a proper back yeah yeah and and and look there's really sort of important sort of training and uh we'll make But I've been 20 years now as the MP for Dongster North, incredibly important to me.

33:31It teaches me every day so much about politics, about government, about what we're doing right, what we're not doing right. you know let's let's look then at the so you come in in 2005 and i guess one of the themes is that as this remarkable growth happened in britain from the late 80s into the 90s there was a big deepening inequality between london and southeast and the rest of the country i mean i can you know we'll get on to what cameron screwed up but what what do you think in retrospect from 97 to 2010 could have been done to make sure we didn't end up with this enormous regional inequality.

34:12I think sort of saying what could have been done is obviously a complicated question, but I think there's no question that the growth was too unbalanced, too based on sort of financial services. And eventually, obviously, as we saw with the crash, left us too exposed. And I think the great thing about the government was that we use, as I said earlier, the proceeds of growth to invest in public services, and they got better in places like Doncaster significantly better. What we didn't do was change the fundamental insecurity of the economy and the sense of precariousness that people felt. And for a constituency like mine, a former mining constituency, whatever the deep challenges and difficulties of those coal mining jobs, they offered security, a decent pension, a sense of community.