"We were naive about me running for leader. We were naive! Actually, I’m going through the list of people for whom it’s been good that I lost the election.”
Say hello to Ed Miliband, the 2021 version. He’s open, regretful, surprisingly ebullient. Maybe it’s the weather.
It’s the first spring-like morning of the year on Hampstead Heath, North London, when we first meet, the kind that gives sensitive souls hope for the year ahead. “I can’t get over this!” Miliband says, striding boldly up a hill. Other walkers clock him, nudge elbows. He affects obliviousness. After all, this is his daily walk from his house in nearby Dartmouth Park, his stomping ground of the past 12 years.
He’s also back on the frontbenches, literally and metaphorically. A year ago, Sir Keir Starmer gave him a hefty new job, shadow secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, a substantial role thanks to Brexit and Covid-19. His weekly political podcast, Reasons To Be Cheerful, with Sony Award-winning DJ Geoff Lloyd, is going great guns. His new book, Go Big: How To Fix Our World, is out now, full of ambitious ideas about how to solve gigantic social issues such as working life, childcare and climate change.
But behind him are the 2010s, which began brilliantly and ended devastatingly. He’d turned 40 on Christmas Eve 2009, when he was a Gordon Brown-backed frontbencher in a Labour-majority government. By the following summer, after a general election that ended in a hung parliament, Shakespearean mists of vaulting ambition had overtaken him. By September, he’d beaten older brother, foreign secretary David – the dashing, Blairite heir to the throne – to Labour’s top job.
Many would argue this was when his ambition “o’erleaped itself”, like Macbeth’s, and fell on “th’other”; today, Miliband sort of agrees. “We were naive” – he talks of the decision to run in terms of his conversations at home with wife Justine – “but it’s very hard to understand the level of scrutiny, the level of intrusion, taking over your life.” His five-year stretch in charge is one most people remember from memes, of rashers of pork stuffed between slices of bread falling out of his mouth, of an eight-foot-tall ceremonial stone engraved with election pledges looming behind him, like a rejected prop from The Thick Of It.
By Miliband’s 50th birthday, the Tories were celebrating their first landslide majority since Margaret Thatcher. On his 51st, the UK-EU Trade And Cooperation Agreement was announced, rubber-stamping Brexit. But usually if a politician is beaten brutally at the polls, they run away to a luxury writing shed or to a slick senior role in a fancy international organisation. Miliband did something unusual: he turned his humiliation into his armour and it became his career propellant.
This flawed, funny Miliband sparkles with an Alan Partridge-like flourish through Go Big, a hefty, thoughtful book with 779 footnotes. Chapter one gives you its flavour: “I am standing in a hotel room in Copenhagen in my pants getting ready to go to bed for the first time in 48 hours. Those who know a little about me may not be surprised to learn that I haven’t been on a two-day Nordic bender.”
It belies confidence that has skyrocketed recently at the dispatch box and on political TV shows too. “Come on,” Miliband railed at Boris Johnson during one parliamentary debate in September, a clip of which went viral. “[I know you’re] a details man!” Johnson squirmed in his seat like a toddler with a full nappy. “He’s just a chancer, really, isn’t he?” Miliband says today, laughing, as I bring up that particular incident.
I was warned of Miliband’s puppyish anxiety around journalists. Today it’s nowhere. He comes across like a kind, curious, chatty youth, not a man who suffered a humiliating, traumatic downfall. But later, I think of him using the pronoun “we” when he mentioned his naivety to run for leader. “We” places him as a family man, as someone who makes decisions collectively. It might also distance him from his decisions as an ambitious individual and the ramifications they would go on to have.
Miliband HQ is a four-storey house behind a pastel-blue door on a street magically insulated from nearby bus routes and Heath walkers. On pale-pink walls hang framed pictures of unassuming modern art and a portrait of Justine with their sons, Daniel, now eleven, and Samuel, ten, without Ed. A television is shoved in a corner, looking like a low priority. A trampoline in the garden and felt-tipped cartoon of Sonic The Hedgehog on the fireplace offer tiny glimpses of family life.
We discuss the emergence of Miliband 2.0 to much amusement. He arrived after an email came from DJ Geoff Lloyd in 2017 suggesting the pair do a positive political podcast together. Lloyd had interviewed him on Absolute Radio during the 2015 general election campaign and they had an instant rapport: Lloyd the cheeky little brother to Miliband’s trusting, geeky elder. A film of their chat had almost 200,000 YouTube views.
“I think the podcast has changed me,” Miliband says, stretching out on his sofa. “It’s probably true to say that [it] gives me control, too, being completely candid. Control is something you don’t have as a politician. It allows me to be super-relaxed ‘Podcast Ed’. I certainly wasn’t him when I was leader.” The podcast also revealed he does “indeed have a personality”, he adds, with a smile.
Surely that must be infuriating, given some politicians are allowed to have a personality when in power, I say, like the prime minister. “I think it’s harder for Labour people,” Miliband says, shrugging. “The media is less forgiving. But I also take my own responsibility for it.” And from that lit touchpaper, he’s off on a leadership postmortem.
He campaigned badly: “Mario Cuomo, the [former] New York governor, said, ‘You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.’ Maybe I campaigned in prose.” He was “significantly younger” when he ran and too in touch with the party’s commitment to “message discipline”. Meaning what? “One word out of place gets you a bad headline in the Daily Mail. You then have to spend three days clearing it up. That caution can be quite constricting.” More than anything, he knows now that politics is “primary colours. People have busy lives and unless they know in very bold strokes what you’re actually saying, it’s going to get lost.” His watchword is boldness. “I wish I’d been bolder.”
Then come the theories. He knows why Brexit was successful: “So many people in my constituency [Doncaster North] – one of the highest-voting Brexit constituencies in the country – said to me, ‘I’m voting for a new beginning for my grandkids.’ It wasn’t just about immigration or the European Union. It was about a much deeper sense of yearning for something different.” He also understands why Trump connected with people and mentions one of his 2016 campaign adverts. “Honestly, parts of it sounded like Jeremy Corbyn. He was saying the working class have been robbed of their livelihoods and so on by the global elite. Now, I’m sure Trump didn’t mean a word of it, but he was speaking to that pain and sense of loss that people had about the precariousness of life, about the insecurity of life.”
Later, I ask Miliband directly what he thought of Corbyn. He’s too nice – or canny – to bite. “I’m reticent to be personally critical of people. I’m sure Jeremy feels the responsibility for the defeat in 2019 like I took responsibility for my defeat in 2015.” He defers all questions about Corbyn to the Labour Together report published in June 2020, analysing what had gone wrong in the general election. “It said he [Jeremy] was not popular with the electorate, the Brexit issue was ‘dividing our coalition’ and the party’s position [on Brexit] definitely alienated some voters. People don’t think we were presenting a credible offer. I don’t shy away from that. After four election defeats, we’ve clearly got a mountain to climb.” May’s local elections loom as he says this.
Does Miliband feel a sense of responsibility about what happened to the Labour Party – the division, the disarray – after he became leader? “I definitely take responsibility for the defeat in 2015,” he says, diplomatically. But you see social democratic parties all around the world struggling to assemble winning coalitions, he adds. “And if you look at the electoral arithmetic here [the move away from us] dates back some years.” The report shows the strength of voter identification with the Labour Party falling from the mid-1980s. It dramatically declined between 2001 and 2010.
Things aren’t looking much rosier for Labour now, to put it mildly. Just before I meet Miliband, a Britain Elects poll revealed that more voters now view Sir Keir Starmer negatively than positively. I find it striking that Miliband keeps talking about boldness, which barely squares with Starmer’s softly-softly approach. Miliband doesn’t agree. “He’s given me a great quote for the book about economic boldness. He didn’t have to do that.” I argue that Starmer, his boss, did. He brushes this off.
He feels for Starmer. “Honestly, it’s such a difficult job. You get millions of pieces of advice. Keir is a man of great integrity and decency. He has been responsible, he has been sober, he has been constructive. There’s only one thing you can do as a leader, or indeed as a politician, and that’s to be yourself. That’s what he’s doing.” Being yourself, of course, is something Boris Johnson does all too well. The pre-election sleaze scandal is a few weeks away, but his rogueish, larger-than-life bounder persona is still generally serving him well. Starmer’s often withers, inaudibly, in its reflection.
His chancer comment aside, Miliband won’t criticise the prime minister more personally: I wonder when this decency becomes a liability rather than a strategy. The closest he comes is in a later follow-up call. I’m at home and my seven-year-old bursts in, hears me saying “Boris Johnson” and shouts that he’s an idiot, that he doesn’t like him. “Your son’s clearly someone of good judgement,” Miliband hams.
But on this first spring-like morning of the year, we leave the house and we walk, taking in the sunshine. I realise that to try to understand this upbeat, geeky man I have to go back to his childhood, which he touches upon in the book. At eleven, he would “argue the toss with the slightly nonplussed friends of my parents who came round to dinner... I must have been a pretty irritating child.” He also had geeky pop-culture fascinations, including American football and Dallas, “much to the bemusement of my Marxist father”. Ralph Miliband was 45 when his youngest son was born and had a heart attack when he was three. “I was very aware of his vulnerability,” Miliband says.
This endured. At 21, Miliband recalls badgering his father to get a new heart consultant. When Ralph finally found someone, he needed an emergency bypass “and then he took a year to recover, then he died”. Miliband’s never really thought about what having an older father meant before. “Although I do remember somebody when I was younger saying to me, ‘The thing about having an older parent is you don’t tend to rebel.’”
There was more vulnerability to be acknowledged, historically, on both sides of Miliband’s family. When his Polish-born mother, Marion, was five, the Second World War began: alongside her sister and mother, she was sheltered, at great risk, by Catholics. Her father, Dawid, wasn’t with them: he died in a concentration camp three months before the end of the war. Seventeen of Ralph’s side of the family were sheltered by a Belgian farmer. Ralph and his father managed to flee to Belgium then escape to England, all on foot.
These family narratives have had a huge impact on Miliband, he admits, but he doesn’t linger on the trauma. “I think people are basically good. There’s so much goodness in people. I know that sounds trite, but I genuinely believe that.” The proximity of family history also lingers in his life because his mother still lives nearby. How’s she found the pandemic? “She’s got Alzheimer’s, unfortunately. So she’s pretty... It’s pretty difficult.” Diagnosed in 2014 when her youngest son was still leader, she has carers, managed between Ed and David. This means the brothers talk “quite a lot” these days. “I mean, it’s mainly centred around my mum.”
Miliband sounds nervous today only around mentions of his brother. They holidayed in New York a few years ago, he says, where David lives and works as CEO of the International Rescue Committee. It matters to Ed that their children know each other, however distant they are geographically: they have a good relationship. That’s about as far as he’ll go. Does Ed think David will ever return to British politics? “Er, I don’t know, really. I think that’s a thing for him. I mean, look: he’s making a difference in a really important way.” And that’s that.
As we amble back towards his home, another contemporary of Miliband’s leadership years comes up. What does he think of Sir Nick Clegg working for Facebook? His response comes with a dollop of cantankerous camp. “I feel more annoyed at him for keeping David Cameron in power in the way that he did rather than going to work for Mark Zuckerberg.” He does find social media “upsetting”, he adds: someone from his team generally tweets for him now. “Not because of the things people say about me – although that can be upsetting – [but] watching two people who I have respect for having an absolute hammer-and-tongs spat... I don’t love the hatred.”
When he thinks of those years alongside Clegg and Cameron, though, one regret lingers more than most. He became Labour leader when his eldest son, Daniel, was 15 months old and his youngest, Samuel, was a few months away from being born. “I’ve been too absent as a father. When my father was there, he was there. He never said, ‘I’m too busy.’”
Miliband spends lots of time with his children now, although he got into trouble for writing his book during their last summer holiday. His losing the election has also been good for his wife, he says, happily: she became a High Court judge, therefore a QC and a dame, in 2019. “Her career’s taken off. I don’t think it’s coincidental.”
He sounds almost jolly, almost glad that he lost. Maybe he was. “Ha! Not really, if I’m honest. I mean...” He composes himself. “No. Because I put my heart and soul into it, for all the faults and all the things I did wrong. This is why it’s complicated.”
He’s also still competitive. As we walk past the Highgate Men’s Pond, he raves about his latest hobby: cold-water swimming. “It was cold – five or six degrees – and I was doing 20 minutes’ swimming. Alastair Campbell went and only did 12.” Miliband knows because the lifeguard told Campbell and Campbell then texted Miliband. “I knew he was a very competitive person.” He smiles and raises his eyebrows. “I turned out to be, as well!”
As Miliband’s house approaches, he lays out his beliefs ahead of May’s elections. He believes Covid-19 should kick politics into action (“Part of the job of politics is to make sense of the collective experience, the trauma that many people have been through, to understand why it happened, but also to say, ‘Look, we can do better”). He talks about leadership needing to be about empathy (“It’s this very untapped and incredibly important aspect”), but he’d never run again. “Oh, no! No, no, no! I don’t think so!” Now he looks traumatised. “I think I did that gig.”
What he does want to talk about is how much has changed in his lifetime. “Think about the changes in LGBT rights or the minimum wage or in the institution of the NHS... People couldn’t have imagined them happening and they happened.” He mentions the need for massive social housing projects and for deprivation and inequality to be fixed after Covid-19. “Other countries do things like this now.” He shrugs, boyishly. “Why aren’t we?” There’s a lot more of this in his book.
We speak again, twice, over the next six weeks. The first time just after a Jennifer Arcuri exclusive ran in the Sunday Mirror, raising more questions about her relationship with Johnson and the misuse of public funds. “God, it’s passed me by completely,” Miliband says.
The second time, the Tory sleaze scandal is growing. Miliband allows himself a little steam. “The way the country runs should not be based on who you know and whose mobile number you’ve got,” he says. “It’s like having mates’ rates. It’s not the way to do things.”
Like a Bullingdon Club ethos writ large? “Yes! I think it’s the way the government operates. It’s the way Johnson operates – but this goes deeper.” He brings up the three million self-employed he’s been working with who didn’t qualify for pandemic financial support. “They’ve struggled to get a meeting with the treasury minister. That’s what this is about. Cameron can send text messages to Rishi Sunak. It’s about him having access that other people don’t have.”
Still, Miliband never sounds angry. He doesn’t even seem to get annoyed when the Tories steal his ideas, such as the energy price cap, which they did in 2017 – he’d called for it in his general election campaign. “People said it was bonkers back then. But suddenly these things look relatively mainstream and uncontroversial, so you’ve got to keep going.” Don’t people who steal his ideas ever make him feel like punching a wall? “Or howling into the void!” He says, laughing. He obviously avoids this at all costs.
Politics needs to be about the big things, he stresses. “Not small, trivial things. We’ve got to resist that. We have to. We’ve just got to.” Two weeks later, Labour loses Hartlepool to the Tories, and shifts attention from triumphs elsewhere to the bloody drama of Starmer briefly sacking Angela Rayner. But when I say goodbye to the leader that failed but bounced back, he’s off to rally voters, full of beans, full of life. He remains Dawid’s buoyant grandson, Ralph and Marion’s optimistic child, a man wanting to turn the past into something hopeful.
Go Big: How To Fix Our World by Ed Miliband (Vintage, £18.99) is out now.
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