How Ed Miliband became the power behind Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer’s early leadership was defined by the expulsion of his predecessor. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour MP and will not be a Labour candidate at the next election. But now another former party leader is quietly defining Starmer’s leadership. This week Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, caused outrage by suggesting that rich countries should pay aid to nations worst hit by climate change.

Miliband’s influence extends far beyond his brief. Resentment has been brewing among Labour frontbenchers about just how much Starmer seems to listen to him. After all, he presided over one of Labour’s worst election results in 2015, a memory that has faded only because Corbyn did even more damage four years later.

‘He’s the elephant in the room,’ says one party figure. Miliband seems to be everywhere; his ideas crop up in many of Labour’s core policy proposals and he’s present in the leader’s office quite often too. ‘He just kind of hangs around a lot,’ says one aide. There is a split in Starmer’s office between those who like the very affable and thoughtful Miliband and want to hear his ideas, and those who like having him around but think he’s often quite wrong.

‘Miliband just kind of hangs around a lot,’ says one aide

In Miliband’s defence, he gets access because he works for it. He will beaver away with his team to draw up whatever is asked of him. As a result, Starmer’s ideas have a distinctly Miliband flavour to them: Labour’s big pitch at the party’s autumn conference was for a state-backed energy company. The conference slogan was ‘a fairer, greener future’, which many dismissed behind the scenes as sounding, as one insider put it, ‘like a washing-up liquid advert’. There was a row, too, over changing the party’s logo from a red rose to a green bloom.