Ed Stone to elder statesman: the making of Ed Miliband

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, from Ed Stone to Elder Statesman.

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1:31This time, 10 or so years ago, Ed Miliband was mostly remembered for pushing his older brother David out of the way to become leader of the Labour Party, only to lose the general election and become an internet meme for eating a bacon sandwich. It was a different time. He's been around so long now, he sort of feels like a sort of familiar bit of political furniture in a funny sort of way, right? We've seen him evolve through a lot of different roles. But, yeah, what would we say? A bit of a nerd? Nothing wrong with a bit of a nerd, of course. But over the last decade, Miliband seems to have undergone a quiet transformation.

2:11From one-time awkward political goof with big ideas to serious political strategist who not only knows how to get things done, but is driven by political principles. Remember them. But the Prime Minister is right to say that the Labour government has not done enough in the face of what is happening. So today marks the beginning of a new approach. An approach that not only calls out injustice and suffering, but acts. And in taking this stance... By calling out Israel's settler terrorists, by naming the ethnic cleansing happening in the West Bank, The Foreign Secretary has broken from decades-long government policy on UK-Israel relations.

2:58And, his supporters say, he's only just getting started. From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, the making of Ed Miliband.

3:16Heather Stewart, you're The Guardian's economics editor and you were also a political editor and economics journalist for a long stretch of Ed Miliband's career. Now, this week as Foreign Secretary, he's made perhaps the most significant move a British Foreign Secretary has made in decades, which is this total reset of relations with Israel. You know, he's referred to the ethnic cleansing happening in the West Bank. He's announced sanctions on services and goods from the occupied territories. He's basically made headlines around the world drawing rage and respect from many quarters. So in short, it's been a huge week.

3:52Can you explain how significant the announcement's been? Yeah, I think it's very significant. It was refreshing that it involved confronting the US in a way that it seems to me that Keir Starmer's government was quite unhappy about doing. and it was interesting that he made the point that he was speaking as a Jew, I thought, being willing to sort of stand up and make the argument very strongly and not afraid to sort of stand up for principles. Well, I speak, Justin, as a British Jew and the reason we took the action yesterday is because we see the two-state solution, the only hope, in my view, for security and dignity for both the Israeli and Palestinian people being destroyed before our eyes by the facts on the ground.

4:41That was not something we necessarily saw in Keir Starmer's government. So in a way, it felt like a return to, I think in the Blair government, it was called an ethical foreign policy. You know, Robin Cook was foreign secretary. Some of that kind of attitude came through, I think, that we the government have some principles. You know, so he talked about this really being about a two-state solution and you have to keep alive the idea of a two-state solution. And some things follow from that. and one of those is that you have to oppose a legal settlement. So it was a sort of principled statement, a principled approach, I think, in a way that maybe we haven't heard for a while.

5:13And Andy and I took the view that as a government, we are not going to be passive. We are not going to stand by. And so did a number of our international allies because this was concerted action because of deep, deep, deep, deep, deep sense of urgency about acting. Well, how did it go down? because as you said, despite saying that, you know, he is Jewish, he was still called a Jew hater by Mike Huckabee, the US's ambassador to Israel. How did the announcement go down with other countries and how do you think it's gone down within the Labour Party itself? So I think it sparked a backlash among a lot of other countries, including the US, obviously, and Israel, which has reacted with fury.

5:55Although that won't have come as a surprise, right? It's not at all surprising that this is not in line with US foreign policy. And so that will have been a conscious decision. Views differ within the Labour Party right on this very complex issue of the Middle East, just as they do across society. I do think there was a chunk of the Labour Party that felt that Keir Starmer was not tough enough on Israel and didn't move quickly enough to condemn what was happening in Gaza. And so I think there will be some relief in parts of the Labour Party that this is a government that is willing to take a somewhat tougher line.

6:28Heather, you have met Ed several times and you've got a strong sense of his political antennae and his personality. How do you think the backlash would have affected him? Well, I think he was always someone who had strong principles and was willing to stand up for them. So if you remember in 2013, when there was that really difficult decision about whether the UK should join in with bombing Syria after Assad had used chemical weapons on his population and Labour, led at the time by Ed Miliband, decided not to support that. And in the end, it didn't go ahead. We've learnt all those lessons. This is a Labour Party that is changing under my leadership, learning what went wrong in the past.

7:05And we've applied those lessons to the issue of Syria in, I hope, a calm and measured way. And I think we contributed this evening to the Prime Minister seeing sense. And that was not an easy decision to make and a decision to make that, again, meant picking a fight with the US, Barack Obama, so on. I do think over time you can see that he's kind of matured and found his voice as he's been on this sort of journey from losing political leader, you know, taking his party to humiliating defeat at a general election, you know, to being ready to taking on this now big role.

7:49So Heather, Ed Miliband has been a notable name in the Labour Party for decades and he comes from a particularly political family. Can you tell me about his formative years and how he began his career in politics? Yeah, so he's North London sort of through and through. His parents were Jewish refugees. His father was a sort of noted Marxist intellectual. So he grew up with very clever people coming in and out of the house and, you know, those sorts of discussions and dinner parties and so on. But he started his political career quite young as an advisor in Gordon Brown's Treasury in 1997 when Labour came into power.

8:27I think he was particularly involved in conceiving the idea of tax credits so that the government would sort of top up your income if you were on low pay, even if you were in work. But he was seen very much as a sort of a policy wonk, you know, into the spreadsheets and the detail of policy. So he became MP for Doncaster North in 2005. he rose to the ranks to become a cabinet minister. He was, as you say, particularly close to Gordon Brown and was generally, again, as you say, seen as this very earnest, bookish political nerd. Except he wasn't the only Miliband making political waves. Heather, can you tell me about his brother, David, and where the relationship between the two ended up?

9:06So David was the first Miliband brother to be foreign secretary in cabinet at the same time as Ed was energy and climate change secretary. After Labour lost the general election in 2010, there was a question about who would go on to lead the party. Gordon Brown resigned. David was seen as the more obvious choice, wasn't he? Yeah, exactly. And David had been foreign secretary, obviously, and was seen as a very sort of plausible candidate for leader. And then you had this extraordinary situation. I don't know if you can imagine it in your family. I'd like to think, you know, my sibling and I would be able to sort it out between us.

9:41But both of them ended up standing for the Labour leadership. I've been asking over the last few days, it's obviously been a subject of intense speculation in the media and elsewhere. I've had lots of messages from people about it as well. And that's the question of who my mum is going to support in this leadership election. It was portrayed at the time as Ed was somehow stabbing David in the back. I'm not sure why Ed was stabbing David and David wasn't stabbing Ed, to be honest. Because David was the older brother, right? Yeah, I suppose so. I suppose so. But the outcome of this sort of fierce sibling rivalry was that Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership and David Miliband decided he wouldn't join his brother's shadow cabinet.

10:26Ouchie.

10:37So Ed Miliband wins that battle. He becomes Labour leader. But it didn't go brilliantly. And lots of us will remember the gaffes rather than the direction that he wanted to take the party in. Heather, what did Ed want to achieve? And how did it all go wrong? Well, part of it's about healing, right, after an extremely difficult defeat. You know, Labour was in power at the time of the global financial crisis. And the Conservatives under David Cameron and George Osborne were very, very good. sort of nailing that on Labour and spent some of their first years in power, essentially suggesting that Labour had sort of bankrupt Britain or bust us or whatever.

11:12And so that was quite a difficult thing to wrestle with the legacy of a government that you have been part of. You know, and to some extent, there was a feeling that Ed didn't do enough, I think, to repudiate in some way. Heather, you know, I'm thinking of the gaffes. I'm thinking of bacon sandwich. Well, Ed Stone. You know, I think Ed and his biggest fans would happily say he's maybe had a sort of slightly awkward public demeanour. But, you know, the press really, really went for him. They went for the fact that he was Jewish. They went for the fact that his father had been this sort of Marxist.

11:45You know, there were sort of headlines about whether his father loved Britain, if I remember rightly. Particularly one from the mail. Mad question to ask. And there were lots of kind of seizing on awkward photographs. So the one everyone probably remembers is, you know, Ed sort of cramming a bacon sandwich into his mouth. You know, the way it works, once there's a sort of embarrassing picture of a politician, it just gets shown again and again and again. And I think there was also this sense of, you know, was he capable of being a leader on the global stage? So there was a particular interview in the run up to the 2015 general election where Ed Miliband was doing a sort of one to one in front of a public audience with Jeremy Paxman, who at the time was this big sort of scary political interviewer.

12:30And Paxman said that he'd encountered a member of the public who'd said something along the lines of what happens if Ed Miliband's in a room with Vladimir Putin? You know, is he tough enough to withstand Vladimir Putin?

12:41Heather Stewart:Ed Miliband goes into a room with Vladimir Putin. The door is closed. Two minutes later, the door is opened again and Vladimir Putin is standing there smiling and Ed Miliband is all over the floor in pieces. Was that David Cameron who you met on the tube? No, it wasn't. I don't think he uses the tube. Ed gave a quite long answer talking about the Syrian bombing and so on, but the conclusion of it was... It's painful to hear this. We're both cringing, aren't we, even saying it? But his sort of conclusion was, hell yeah, I'm tough enough. Tuss enough. Am I tough enough? Hell yes, I'm tough enough.

13:12Yeah, and, you know, those kind of things, you know, shouldn't matter in a way. But I think it came to encapsulate this slight feeling maybe the public had. He was a bit young. He was being mocked, wasn't he? He was being mocked, yeah. He was absolutely being mocked for the way that he speaks and the way that he looks. But then there was the fated Ed Stone where he essentially seemed to be burying himself with. I was just about to mention that. So Labour had this brilliant pledge card in the run up to 1997 that had these sort of very brief promises to the public. So there was an idea that Labour had to go into 2015 also with some quite straightforward promises.

13:44Obviously, it was a brilliant idea to inscribe them in stone as a sort of visible metaphor for how seriously Labour took its promises to the public. These six pledges are now carved in stone. They're carved in stone because they won't be abandoned after the general election. I want the British people to remember. It looked like a tombstone. I mean, these things are always ridiculous. You know, I watched Boris Johnson drive a bulldozer through a wall of polystyrene bricks, which frankly was no less ridiculous. But you can become a meme in a good way or you can become a meme in a bad way, right?

14:15And Ed with his big stone full of promises, it was not great. Like, it played into this sense that this wasn't someone who was a serious leader. Ed didn't seem comfortable in his own skin and it all sort of went together to become, I don't know, a bit of a laughingstock, I fear. And yet, Heather, you know, Ed did work consistently on the energy and climate brief for a long time and by some was considered so effective at that. But even the successive Tory government didn't actually rip up all the work and start again, but, you know, pursued net zero as a government priority. In that period on the backbenchers, I guess is when we saw the beginning of Ed 2.0, the relaxed rebrand.

14:53Can you tell me about that? Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour leadership and Ed remained sort of out of the fray. He went off to the back benches, which is, you know, appropriate for ex-leaders in a way, I think. Although he didn't sort of flee Parliament as Keir Starmer is doing. Or his brother. Yes, or his brother indeed. And he kind of reinvented himself a bit. So he started doing this podcast. Reasons to be cheerful. Reasons to be cheerful, very upbeat podcast, which did extremely well in a sort of slightly earlier era of podcast. Oh, yeah, definitely before your Alistair Campbell's and your Rory Stewart's.

15:27Yeah, but it did have quite a big... So I can remember, you know, happening to be in the same tube carriage as Ed one night on the way home when I was working in Westminster and him sort of standing there in the tube carriage and a couple of young women kind of buzzing up to him and sort of saying, you know, you're the reasons to be cheerful. Yeah, right, exactly. And not to do with anything he'd done that was to do with the Labour Party, but because, you know, they quite like this sort of cheery podcast about, you know, kind of about big ideas and about ways to change the world. You know, he wrote a book as well, Go Big, which was again was about let's not be afraid of big ideas in politics.

16:12And so effectively became much more relaxed, better communicator. and then you know he comes back as cabinet minister for energy climate net zero under Starmer. Heather correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like a kind of political truth that he was the most effective and capable secretary of state in a Starmer government that was otherwise defined by inertia. How did he operate and how did he get what he wanted done? So I think it helped that at least initially he was quite close to Starmer. I think he had a very very clear sense of the brief because as you say not only had he done the job before but he'd also spent quite a lot of time in between thinking about it and talking about it and having ideas and so he came in with this really clear sense of kind of mission and obviously Kirstarman's government set itself a series of missions in inverted commas I mean I don't really know what happened to be honest a lot of them sort of slid away and defined out of existence but actually the sort of green mission the mission to try and achieve net zero while creating plenty of jobs.

17:13That was very clear. I mean, critics, I think, would say, you know, that he was sort of too messianic or too, you know, too zealous about it. But he got the job done. He knew which levers to pull. Yeah. So solar rollout is happening very quickly. For example, loads of new wind power being given permission, building rules being changed so that all new houses have solar panels. All this kind of stuff of just, you know, all the levers. Let's pull all the levers. Let's have a really clear idea of what we want to do. And it seemed to stand out a bit in a government that, as you say, didn't really seem to have that much of a project.

17:46So, yeah, I think it was in some ways it was controversial. And certainly the right wing press love having a go at him and see him as this sort of hate figure, as a bit of a sort of zealot. He's one of those Labour figures that they really love to kind of have a go at. But he did seem to be someone who got on with his area of government and seemed to be able to get stuff done. And as a result of that, he was really being talked up as the front runner to be the new chancellor under an Andy Burnham government. Certainly, you know, lots of kind of the kind of left wing economists that I talked to were really keen on this idea.

18:17Right. He was inside the Treasury. He knows how it works. He's got principles. He's got a program. He'd hit the ground running, all that sort of stuff. But it was a real campaign against him. Right. Partly from union leaders who are very keen on oil extraction continuing in the North Sea. Miliband had sort of set himself against that and was dangerous in that way. Partly also from people in a different bit of the Labour Party who felt that he would alarm the city and the bomb markets and all of that. So he has this sort of, there's a bit of a bogeyman thing there, I think, that even others in the kind of Labour movement feel about him.

18:53So where does he draw his support within the Labour Party? How is he defined politically? Where's his position? I think he's in the sort of brownite soft left wing of the party I suppose or soft left bit of the party. Yeah I think he probably is seen as quite influential because he's seen as someone who you know is willing to get into the nitty gritty detail of a policy area. He's likely to have sort of read all the big books and you know spoken to all the big thinkers and very much in the mould of Gordon Brown to be honest. Well, there was talk about him potentially succeeding Starmer before sort of Burnham Menuh really took hold.

19:25And there's a quote from Miliband from the spring that I do actually find really interesting when he told the New Statesman, you don't need to be the leader of a political party to fight for big things. How true do you think that is for him particularly? I mean, a foreign secretary can definitely be influential, right? And in a way, you know, there was some talk that I'm sure there were lots of reasons that he wasn't made chancellor but I suspect one of those was you are incredibly influential as chancellor and veterans of the Blair Brown government which Andy Burnham is will remember that as chancellor you can you can kind of hold the rest of government hostage right you can you know not that I'm suggesting Burnham and Miliband are not in tune but you know you're really handing someone a lot of power to make them chancellor and to sort of set the direction and maybe Burnham felt he wanted to be the one who set the direction.

20:13But it does feel like a different kind of deal doesn't it Because Burnham seems much more focused on domestic affairs and it means that a foreign secretary under him would have a bigger brief than other foreign secretaries prior to that. Is that true for Miliband then? Do you think with Burnham, he ceded some power and sort of said, go off and do your thing? It's early days, but certainly I think it is a particularly big role potentially in an anti-Burnham government because Burnham has said he doesn't want to do as much travel as, for example, Keir Starmer did, who seemed to rather enjoy the foreign policy part of his job, less so the domestic side of it.

20:47Whereas Burnham has made quite clear that he wants to focus on the domestic, which actually opens up quite a big role for the foreign secretary. It seems that he and I suppose Burnham wants to dial up the importance of climate diplomacy as part of what we do in reaching out to other countries and looking for sort of collective action on things. It also seems that he wants to make international development more important. There was a separate Secretary of State for International Development, Claire Short, who was a really powerful minister and Labour made that a sort of moral crusade really under Gordon Brown.

21:21Got completely slashed under Starmer. Keir Starmer's government slashed international aid. And I'm not suggesting that suddenly under Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband that's going to be reversed. But I think there is an intention to put some more emphasis on that. And that's a big strand of Labour's kind of historic sort of base and Labour politics. And, you know, so that's another part of it, I think. Coming up, will Ed Miliband be tough enough for Trump?

22:04Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. A missed call doesn't feel like anything. No red flag, no notifications screaming at you. It just disappears into your call log. And nine times out of 10, that was someone ready to hand you money. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I like about it. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. No more, wait, who talked to this customer last?

22:41And if you're worried about after-hours leads slipping through, Quo's optional built-in AI agent can answer questions and even book appointments while your team's offline. It's the number one rated business phone system on G2, and over 90 ,000 businesses already trust it to stay reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash tech. That's q-u-o.com slash tech.