History has its mysteries – the building of Stonehenge, the fate of the Mary Celeste – but little is as baffling as the rise of Ed Miliband.
On Monday Andy Burnham named his Cabinet. Initially all seemed fine: despite rumours, Mr Miliband was not going to be Chancellor. Financiers loosened their girdles. Families thought ‘phew’.
Then came the sucker-punch. Instead of being sent to the Treasury, Mr Miliband was given the Foreign Office.
Red Ed as Foreign Secretary? You might more plausibly claim Alan ‘Chattyman’ Carr had become a Trappist abbot or the Dalai Lama had taken up golf. At the world’s top diplomatic gatherings, we will in future be represented by that trouser-flapping wonk Miliband, cross-eyed agent of chaos.
Has Andy Burnham forgotten the Ed Stone, the socialist menhir Mr Miliband unveiled before the 2015 general election when he was Labour leader? He was going to erect it in the garden of 10 Downing Street if he won.
Does Eyelashes Andy also not remember Mr Miliband cosying up – yuck – to the now disgraced Russell Brand throughout that campaign? Surely he must recall it was Mr Miliband’s cack-handed change to party membership rules that enabled militants to hijack Labour and insert Jeremy Corbyn as leader, with all the anti-Semitism that unleashed into national life? And does our new PM, a supposed man of the people, not see how unpopular the Miliband Net Zero agenda has become?
Before we consider the pressures that influenced Mr Burnham, we must ask why this appointment is such a bad decision. The reasons divide, broadly, into comedy and tragedy.
Ed Miliband is on the surface a farcical figure, a gurning Mr Bean whose arrival at global symposia will confirm international theories about madcap British humour.
Instead of being sent to the Treasury, Ed Miliband was given the Foreign Office
Has Andy Burnham forgotten the Ed Stone, the socialist menhir Mr Miliband unveiled before the 2015 general election when he was Labour leader
When the United Nations next debates some critical peace-keeping resolution and the chairman invites the United Kingdom to impart its views, plic will go the microphone button and the ensuing voice will be the squashy-schnozzled, spittle-spotted cronk of Miliband Jnr.
Will he lecture them on climate change and the evils of capitalism? Hell, yeah (as he himself once said when Jeremy Paxman asked if he was tough enough to be prime minister). Once Ed sinks those donkey teeth into an opportunity, there’s no stopping him.
He is a cartoonish figure and in politics it can be no bad thing to have a brand. He may have calculated that goofiness helps disguise his Marxian intolerance. On tax, climate change, property ownership and state regulation he is dauntingly dirigiste. An authoritarian. Yet when he speaks, we often laugh. How foolish of us.
Before you say: ‘Oh, there goes the Daily Mail having a go at Miliband just because his dad Ralph was a notorious commie’, bear in mind that one person cruelly used by Ed Miliband was his own brother David, whom he pipped to the Labour leadership in 2010.
David was senior in years and experience. Indeed, he had been Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010 and was even tipped for a return to the post in the Burnham Cabinet. Is that why Ed was so thrilled on Monday night? Psychologists could write tracts on the matter.
To be Foreign Secretary is the grandest, most grown-up of positions. Eco-zealot Ed will have the use of a private jet when he wishes. Foreign Secretaries deal in life-or-death secrets and they supervise MI6. Wars, treaties, intercontinental fissures: these are the regular diet, along with gastronomic delicacies on the statesmanship circuit.
Given the mess Mr Miliband once made of a bacon sandwich, one dreads to think what will happen when he gets stuck in at a Chinese state banquet. A waterproof cagoule for President Xi, please!
Top envoys generally have poker faces. Sangfroid and inscrutability are essentials of the job. No one is less inscrutable than Ed Mil’. In parliamentary debates he scowls, sighs, rolls his eyes and cackles. Although watchable, it is not always edifying.
Join the discussion
What message does Ed Miliband’s appointment as Foreign Secretary send about Britain’s place in the world?
Ed pipped his brother David to the Labour leadership in 2010, even though David was senior in years and experience
Given the mess Mr Miliband once made of a bacon sandwich, one dreads to think what will happen when he gets stuck in at a Chinese state banquet, writes Quentin Letts
When the King travels on state visits he is accompanied by the Foreign Secretary. In the more exotic parts of the globe a monarch may be welcomed by dancing, topless amazons. Heaven knows how Ed will react.
Mr Miliband is no fan of Donald Trump. He has in the past called the US President a ‘racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper’. While that may reflect widespread sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic, it was not diplomatic.
High-level contacts with Washington DC will be complicated. The White House will also know that when Sir Keir Starmer proposed allowing US war planes to use British bases for raids on Iran this year, Cabinet opposition was led by Mr Miliband. He reportedly became ‘petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political’. Uh-oh.
And so to the tragic side of the matter. In 2013, when Mr Miliband was leading the Opposition, he pulled off a rare feat of defeating the government on a war motion. Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had used deadly gas on some 1,400 citizens.
The West wanted to stop Assad and it fell to David Cameron’s coalition government to make the first parliamentary move. Cameron’s memoirs relate how the Labour leader appeared to agree, in private, that military action against Assad was justified.
Then the perpetual man-child Miliband played party-political games. Tony Blair’s Iraq War was still raw in Westminster’s memory. Mr Miliband saw an opportunity and played it for self-advantage. The Commons’ vote against military action – in which a certain Andy Burnham also sided with appeasement – so unsettled Barack Obama that the US went easy on Assad.
Further gas attacks were duly used on Syrian dissidents and Russia’s Vladimir Putin sensed that the West had lost its appetite to stop tyrannous bullies. A year later Putin took back Crimea. Nine years after that he invaded Ukraine.
In his Net Zero proselytising Ed Miliband has often blamed Putin’s Ukraine war for making fossil fuels untenable; had it not been for Mr Miliband’s naked party politics in that Commons vote of August 2013, the Kremlin might never have over-reached itself. Now the idiot responsible is in charge of our foreign policy.
Why has Mr Burnham given him this most sensitive of jobs? I think the answer is vanity. Mr Miliband delusionally convinced himself that he deserved to be Chancellor. When it became apparent he was not going to get it, he worked himself into a huff that could only be assuaged by the foreign secretaryship.
Ed Miliband is a gauche and dangerous nincompoop. In his new position, to which he is so demonstrably ill-suited, he will likely damage our nation’s interests. But it will stroke his ego and soothe his itchy, twitchy brow.
Andy Burnham has prostituted his new government to a fratricidal insecurity complex. Stonehenge’s Neolithic creators would find it astonishing.
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