Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband (born December 24, 1969, London, England) is a British politician who served as leader of the Labour Party (2010–15) and foreign minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Early life and education

Miliband was the son of Jewish (and Marxist) refugees who had survived the Holocaust during World War II. Ralph Miliband, who had fled Belgium in 1940, became a prominent Marxist intellectual in London, where he met and married Marion Kozak, who had been sheltered by a Roman Catholic family in Poland throughout the war. Their sons, David and Ed, thus grew up in a household in which intense political debate was seldom absent for long. Ed followed his brother to Haverstock Comprehensive School and then to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study politics, philosophy, and economics before forging his own path with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. In 1993, after a brief period as a television researcher, he started working for Labour Party MP Harriet Harman.

Early political career and the Brown cabinet

When Labour returned to power after the 1997 general election, Ed became a special adviser to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. With David working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the brothers found themselves in different camps that frequently devolved into intraparty conflict. More than once, the siblings provided the channel through which disputes between Brown and Blair could be settled or, at least, calmed.

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After spending a year (2002–03) as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ed was selected as Labour candidate for Doncaster North, in Yorkshire. He was elected to Parliament in May 2005, four years after David had become an MP. When Brown took over as prime minister in 2007, he named David foreign secretary and added Ed to his cabinet, first as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and then, from October 2008, as the inaugural secretary of state for energy and climate change. Thus, two brothers sat in Britain’s cabinet for the first time since the 1930s. Ed represented the United Kingdom at the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change. Although the summit failed to achieve a legally binding agreement to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, Ed was widely credited as having worked hard for a deal.

Miliband as Labour leader

Following Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election, Brown resigned as party leader, and David was regarded as the favorite to succeed him. Ed’s decision to stand against his brother caused widespread surprise, but, even with three other candidates on the ballot, the contest quickly became a two-horse race. Strong campaigns by leading trade unions gave Ed a narrow victory (trade union members held one-third of the votes) on September 25, 2010. Ed, who was 40 years old, became the party’s youngest leader since World War II. Subsequently David decided to leave front-line politics and not serve in Ed’s shadow cabinet.

In 2011 Ed Miliband led Labour into elections for the National Assembly in Wales, the Scottish Parliament, and local councils throughout Britain with mixed results. While Labour gained 800 seats in local government in England, mostly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, and fared well in Wales, its representation in Scotland shrank so much that the Scottish Nationalist Party obtained an outright majority.

In July 2013, in the wake of a scandal involving alleged tampering by the union Unite in the selection of the Labour candidate to contest a parliamentary seat for a district in Scotland, Miliband called for several significant changes to the party’s procedures. Notably, he proposed that union members no longer automatically be assessed a political contribution (most of which went to Labour); instead of the choice of opting out of the contribution, members would choose whether to opt in. Miliband also advocated the adoption of open primaries to choose the party’s candidates.

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In September 2014, on the eve of voting in Scotland on the ultimately unsuccessful referendum on independence from the United Kingdom, Miliband joined Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in publishing a “vow” in the newspaper Daily Record to increase powers for Scotland’s government should the referendum be rejected. Earlier, in the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament, Labour had gained seven seats to finish ahead of the Conservatives (who lost seven seats) but behind the virulently anti-European Union United Kingdom Independence Party, whose upsurge in support Miliband attributed to a “deep sense of discontent” among the electorate, which he believed Labour would further capitalize upon in the May 2015 British general election as it ran under a manifesto that promised “Britain can be better.”

Opinion polling in the immediate run-up to the general election showed Labour and the Conservatives locked in one of the tightest races in recent British history, with a single percentage point separating them in most polls. When it came time to vote, however, Labour fell far short of the expectations generated by the polling, dropping 26 seats from its performance in the 2010 election to finish with 232 seats, compared with 331 seats for the Conservatives and Cameron, who was able to form a majority government. Labour was especially shaken in its longtime electoral stronghold of Scotland, where the Scottish Nationalist Party catapulted from 6 seats in 2010 to 56 seats in 2015 and Labour held on to only 1 seat, even as Labour’s leader in Scotland, Jim Murphy, and the party’s campaign manager, Douglas Alexander, were ousted. In the aftermath of the drubbing, Miliband resigned his leadership of the Labour Party.

Back benches and role in the Starmer and Burnham cabinets

With the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, Miliband was relegated to the back benches. Miliband was reelected to his seat in the House of Commons in the June 2017 snap election, and he managed to fight off a strong Conservative challenge in the December 2019 general election. Labour’s dismal showing in the 2019 contest ultimately spelled the end of Corbyn’s tenure as leader, and Keir Starmer was elected to replace him in April 2020.

Starmer’s rise to Labour leader saw the restoration of Miliband to the opposition front bench. Miliband served as shadow secretary of state for business, energy, and industrial strategy (2020–21) and shadow secretary of state for energy and net zero (2021–24). When Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for an early election to be held on July 4, 2024, Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory. With Labour’s return to government, Miliband retained the energy portfolio (2024–26) and would do so for the duration of Starmer’s prime ministership.

After a disastrous performance for Labour in the May 2026 local elections, Starmer faced growing pressure from his own party to step down. Attention turned to Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who quickly mounted a campaign to win a seat in Parliament and challenge Starmer for leadership. Recognizing that his position was not tenable, Starmer announced his resignation in June 2026 and Burnham’s ascent to the prime minister’s office was all but assured. When Burnham took office on July 20, 2026, he oversaw a massive cabinet overhaul. Miliband was named foreign secretary, replacing Yvette Cooper (who was subsequently given the health portfolio). Miliband stated that one of his priorities would be to “deepen and strengthen our alliance with the European Union,” a goal that acknowledged both the global security situation and the growing sentiment among the British public that Brexit had been a mistake.