Could Ed Miliband be our next prime minister?
HENRY HILL
At the time of writing, you can get odds of 33/1 on Ed Miliband being our next prime minister – and unless you’re in a position where placing a bet would cause a scandal (due to the media’s absurd misreading of what ‘insider trading’ is), those look like pretty good odds.
It feels a bit ridiculous, on the surface. British politics is hardly averse to recycling characters from previous seasons; just this year we had Peter Mandelson’s third return to, and humiliating departure from, public life, and under the previous government we had David Cameron’s swansong as foreign secretary.
But such roles are usually walk-on parts, played from the House of Lords. Life at the top tends to be far less forgiving, especially in the modern era. It is difficult enough these days to imagine even a successful leader serving two non-consecutive terms in office, as did Harold Wilson; it took the extraordinary phenomenon of Corbynism to let Jeremy Corbyn lose two elections, as did Neil Kinnock.
Were Miliband to actually take the top job, he would have pulled off something more remarkable than either; I cannot immediately think of another politician in the modern age who has failed as leader of the opposition and then gone on to enter Downing Street, with or without an election.
Yet we live in an age of unprecedented developments. Our exhausted political order is manifestly out of ideas, so would it really be so surprising if it were out of people too?
And the more you interrogate the possibility, the more plausible it appears. For Miliband to become our next prime minister, two things must happen. First, Keir Starmer must fall, and almost certainly this side of the next election. Second, Miliband must win the subsequent leadership contest. Neither of these is a long shot.
Starmer at this point is essentially speed-running the normal life-cycle of a government. Having swept into office with an historically huge majority less than 18 months ago, his ministry is already adrift, caught tight between the abysmal and decaying condition of the UK’s public finances and a Labour Party which is utterly unreconciled to what the numbers are telling it.
Not all of this is his fault. If Starmer’s fortunes appear to be simply a more exaggerated repeat of Boris Johnson’s, that is in part because we are simply five years deeper into the doom spiral than we were in 2020; if he set himself up for failure with a cowardly manifesto that didn’t secure him a mandate for any painful decisions, that is in part because of the long shadow of the 2017 election, when Theresa May’s bid to do the right thing on social care allowed Labour to close a 25-point polling deficit.
Regardless of what blame lies where, the basic facts of Starmer’s position remain. He is an administrator, his ministry was summed up to me once as ‘the closest Britain has ever got to direct rule by the Civil Service’. Neither he nor Rachel Reeves have a vision to inspire their party, nor a credible economic plan which might persuade restive backbenchers to knuckle down through tough times.
Most dangerously, Starmer initially secured the leadership by pandering to the soft Left, and justified his later abandonment of them with the ultimate political trump card: winning. The downside of that card is that it only works if you’re actually winning. If Labour take a hammering at next May’s local elections – which might include not merely a rout in English local government but seismic defeats in Scotland and Wales – there seems little reason for the Parliamentary Labour Party to stand by a leader whom neither they or the public like, and whose ministry offers the prospect only of more broken promises, tax rises, and attempted spending cuts.
Our first step, Starmer either stepping down or being forced out before the next election, is thus not implausible (although we should note that Labour tend to be much more reserved than the Conservatives about disposing of leaders). If that happens, how would Miliband be positioned in the subsequent leadership contest?
The answer would seem to be ‘extraordinarily well’. According to LabourList’s Cabinet League Table, Miliband is by a clear margin the most popular minister with Labour members: in the most recent poll his lead over John Healey, the second-most popular, stood at over 30 points.
Historically, this might not have mattered so much because the membership commanded only one third of the vote, alongside the MPs and trades unions, in the electoral college. But that system was scrapped in 2015 – by none other than the then leader, one Ed Miliband – in favour of ‘one member, one vote’. At the time, it ended up being the gateway to Corbynism, but it could yet be the stage door through which its author steps back into the spotlight.
Looking at those numbers, who else might seriously challenge him? Bridget Phillipson is ranked fourth in the LabourList table, but even her one-woman crusade against 25 years of cross-party education reforms couldn’t deliver her the deputy leadership, which she recently lost to Lucy Powell. Angela Rayner might have done it, but she is today shrouded in scandal and on the backbenches.
The strength of Miliband’s position is clearly lost neither on him nor on Starmer. During September’s reshuffle, he was able simply to refuse to move from the energy brief, and prior to that he secured £22 billion in capital funding for pet projects from a cash-starved Treasury. For comparison, the NHS, reportedly Reeves’ top priority, received merely £6bn extra for its own capital budget, with which poor Wes Streeting is supposed to transform the Health Service.
With a desperate Reeves reportedly considering an early end to her ‘windfall tax’ on North Sea oil and gas in a bid to drum up revenue, we may be up for another showdown. After all, she is unlikely to get the guarantees of investment she wants from the drilling companies without a broader change of direction, including a reversal of Miliband’s moratorium on new exploration licences. But with Starmer having completely capitulated on even moderate welfare cuts, there seems little reason to expect the Chancellor to win that fight.
There would at least almost certainly be a strong element of karmic justice to Miliband finally taking the top job. Like Starmer, and to quote Francis Urquhart, he would find himself ‘in the trap and screaming from the moment he took office’, faced with all the same unpalatable decisions he helped to prevent his predecessor making.
But the odds of him getting there in the first place? Almost certainly better than 33/1. Get thee, oh reader, to the bookmakers.
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This article (Could Ed Miliband be our next prime minister?) was created and published by CAPX and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Henry Hill
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