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Nature famously abhors a vacuum. So when Morgan McSweeney departed government, leaving a hole where much of Keir Starmer’s thinking used to be, it was always going to be filled eventually. And increasingly, that filling looks Ed Miliband-shaped.
The energy secretary’s influence has visibly grown in recent weeks, and not just because of a spiralling energy crisis in the Gulf. The idea that he is the real prime minister now – the one supposedly calling the shots over everything from whether Britain should join the war on Iran to how far it should pursue its “fatwa against fossil fuels”, as Michael Gove, the former Tory minister turned Spectator editor-in-chief, huffed recently – is on one level just another attempt by the opposition to humiliate Starmer, painting him as a lame-duck leader pushed around by underlings. But if the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, there’s no denying Miliband has grown in stature of late.
Having quietly become the membership’s favourite cabinet minister last month, he could probably win a leadership contest tomorrow if it wasn’t for the fact that Labour MPs are putting all that on ice for now, realising that interrupting a global crisis for a summer of hustings would look faintly insane. For now, the job is to make the best of what they’ve got.
Still, why Miliband, rather than someone from the party’s formerly dominant right? The answer is partly that the Greens’ victory in Gorton and Denton, combined with the downfall of McSweeney and his mentor Peter Mandelson, is pulling Labour’s centre of gravity inexorably to the left. But it’s perhaps chiefly – as Gove should know, given it’s how he once made himself indispensable in many a crisis – because Miliband is the cabinet’s resident deep thinker at a time when big ideas are suddenly back. Ed Miliband is an intellectual heavyweight at a time when heavyweights are needed; when the vacuousness of recent years looks anything but smart.
What is the new theory of growth, if an oil shock kills the existing one stone dead? How does Britain survive an era of aggressively competing world powers, which will almost certainly entail more conflicts that erupt with little warning and disrupt global supply chains? Can populism be stopped, given another recession would surely only fuel the fire? These are huge questions to which Labour’s answers – not only those of the current leadership, but of Rayner, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham – now look weirdly small, relics from a time where better storytelling skills were deemed to be mostly what was needed.
This administration’s seeming antipathy to big ideas is often traced back to its roots in the Blair years, but that is a misreading of history by those too young to remember what it was actually like. The court of Gordon Brown in which Miliband cut his teeth was intellectually voracious, widely read and rigorously trained to think every argument through from first principles. Tony Blair’s inner circle, though more pragmatic, was never as hollow as its critics suggested: it had its third-way gurus, its intellectual outriders in and out of cabinet plugged into a wider ecosystem of ideas and into an international network of leftwing parties, plus a leader happy to make big set-piece speeches explaining his thinking.
The publication this week of the former Labour cabinet minister Liam Byrne’s new book, Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them – a welcome attempt to generate some new thinking, based on a series of seminars organised together with the thoughtful former Tory minister John Glen at St Antony’s College, Oxford – was a reminder that ambitious juniors in both parties used to churn out books of ideas as a way of getting noticed, rather than waiting until they left office.
But for the last decade and a half, big ideas have been associated in the Labour party either with a kind of embarrassing nerdiness – as if Westminster was a school where being too clever got you duffed up in the playground, which is roughly what happened to Miliband when he was leader – or else with the kind of short-term excitement followed by electoral catastrophe that was exemplified by Corbynism. The wind has all been with populists preaching easy answers: arguing that, actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that, just got you branded a snob. By the summer of 2024, Labour’s campaign was predicated on the argument that nobody wants all that pointy-headed big vision stuff, and that talking about small, practical ways in which people would be better off under new management was the only way to win a jaded electorate’s grudging trust.
Perhaps this form of retail politics could have worked, in some alternate universe where there was money still to pay for it. But, instead, America’s golden age of stupid has culminated in a self-defeating war on Iran, a third economic shock in six years, and with it the looming threat of a recession.
In fairness to Starmer, the last election came arguably too early for him, catching Labour only halfway through its cycle of political renewal: though it had finished cleaning out the stables post-Corbyn, it hadn’t had time to renew itself intellectually. Lacking much of a hinterland of ideas as it came into office, his government had no time to think things through on the hoof either as a string of crises left it winded. But now a new creed is needed. And though Rachel Reeves’s substantial Mais lecture last week was a reminder that he’s not the only cabinet minister to have developed a clear political philosophy, it’s Miliband who entered office with the clearest idea – having seen this movie once before – of what he wanted to get out of it.
That’s not to say he is infallible. Those who have worked for him describe a tendency to over-complicate. He has a fatal knack of being both years ahead of his time – as he was identifying, back in 2010, both the political salience of the financially “squeezed middle” and the post-crash yearning for change – and somehow too far ahead of it to get the credit when everyone else catches up. Not all his ideas are good ones, and as a colleague he isn’t always easy to live with. But arguably this cabinet needs more friction, not less, if it is to sharpen its mental blades for the months ahead. If thinking big thoughts is back, it’s perhaps only because in the shattered remains of what was once the US’s sphere of influence, we now see exactly where the lack of them ends.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
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