Who would be a Labour frontbencher right now? Most of them are looking pretty miserable as they prepare for the wrath of their constituents and local party members over the planned disability benefit cuts. Not so Ed Miliband, one of the only Labour ministers who seems to be enjoying themselves and getting any credit.
The Energy Secretary topped a Cabinet poll of the Labour membership this week, having let it be known that he – among many other ministers – had raised concerns about those welfare cuts.
Cabinet meetings under the Tories were almost a live blog of ministers saying things they knew would get reported instantly. But Labour had enjoyed a few months of confidentiality and polite praise at these meetings before Miliband and other colleagues were reported to have quarrelled over cuts.
He has also been busy building the case for net zero and GB Energy, two policies that wind up critics, but about which Miliband has the sort of missionary zeal which means he will ignore even more reasonable objections. He was happy to say that the Government is “absolutely up for the fight” on net zero after Kemi Badenoch announced this week that it was “impossible” to reach the target by 2050. “This is the growth opportunity of the 21st century,” he argued.
He seems to genuinely enjoy the sorts of fights where he pitches this moral mission for green energy against critics and deniers. Having struggled as Labour leader to really work out what he stood for, he seems totally comfortable in his niche now.
Other colleagues are enjoying it less, with a regular rumbling of briefings against Miliband from figures who think his net zero agenda doesn’t add up, and who dislike how popular he is among the grass roots. They, not unreasonably, point out that the general public offered a rather different take on him when he was leader.
They also feel he has largely been left to his own devices since the election, to the detriment of industries that are still key to Britain’s economy, particularly the oil and gas sector in Scotland.
Before Labour came to power, Keir Starmer and his team ended up dealing with the political equivalent of an oil spill from the then shadow energy secretary when he was suggesting that Labour would effectively shut the industry down. It went down like a lead balloon with Scottish Labour, still smarting from its decimation in the 2015 election when Miliband was leader, and with trade unions like the GMB.
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Read MoreA lot of this resentment in fact reflects that Miliband is an extraordinarily effective politician. Having been a secretary of state in the last Labour government, he knows how to get things done, both within a department and in the political arena.
Even his critics have to admit that he is hard-working and decent to work with, both of which go much further than many politicians realise. He knows how to make himself helpful to a leader, and is always full of ideas and thoughts when others can seem worn-down by the grind of government. He just gets things done sometimes because his rivals haven’t managed to do the legwork, or just aren’t as good as him.
Miliband also benefits from his boss’s deliberate refusal to have a worldview. Starmer has insisted, almost boasted, that there is no such thing as Starmerism because he sees himself as pragmatic. But that does leave a vacuum for other forceful ministers to make their mark – just look at how Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson are changing public services to fit their ideologies – and Miliband knows how to fill the gap.
There is, though, an irony in him benefitting from his views on the welfare cuts somehow making it into the public domain. When he was leader, Miliband would frequently upbraid the Parliamentary Labour Party for being a “party of commentators”.
He also disliked shadow ministers doing exactly the thing he is so good at now, which was striking out on their own and trying to create something of a personal brand. He saw this as being disloyal, rather than – as he would presumably now argue – just someone putting a lot of energy and belief into a job.
Either way, Miliband is a force to be reckoned with, much to the disappointment of those who would like to see him leave his ministerial brief in a reshuffle. One of the responses to the poll putting him top was that this would make it much harder for Starmer to move him. Perhaps a better one from some of his colleagues who either resent him or at least dislike how much influence he is able to have, though, is to copy him.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine
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