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.
It’s not just Starmer who gets his ideas from Miliband. The former Labour leader is still pally with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. He was one of the people pushing her to commit to £28 billion a year of spending to tackle climate change. ‘He thinks this cost of living crisis and the way the public relied on the state during Covid has proved everything he was saying ten years ago,’ says an MP who has warily observed Miliband for many years. ‘He thinks now is his time.’
The other reason Miliband gets such a hearing is because of Starmer’s lack of vision. It’s difficult to pin down what the leader stands for other than competence. Speak to those who work with Starmer and they’ll happily tell you about his work ethic. ‘He’s a professional,’ says one frontbencher. ‘He wants a paper, he wants a policy properly written through so he can read it overnight before we have the meeting. The meeting starts on time and finishes on time. He was genuinely quite offended by the way Boris conducted himself.’ Another ally says: ‘Keir doesn’t think like a politician, he thinks like a CEO. That means that he puts a lot of faith in the people who work for him and the shadow cabinet.’ He has insisted that frontbenchers get training on how to run a government department. Only Yvette Cooper and Miliband have experience as secretaries of state.
This commitment to professionalism is all well and good, but it’s not real substance. Starmer relies heavily on his director of strategy, Deborah Mattinson, to survey focus groups, but one senior figure complains: ‘She goes out to these groups and asks: “What do you want us to say?”’ The problem is that you can’t get your strategy from a focus group: ‘You can test positions or language on the focus groups but you can’t take ideas from them.’
Then there’s Peter Hyman, a former Tony Blair speechwriter who left politics to go into teaching but is back to work on the manifesto. It is difficult to discern which of his blizzard of often conflicting ideas will make it in.
If Starmer doesn’t have a set of guiding principles, then Miliband will readily provide his own. The problem is that the electorate has rejected his principles once before. It’s unlikely that when voters start to look properly at Labour, rather than simply looking away from the Tories, they’ll find Milibandism any more palatable than last time.
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