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After declining several times to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party, David Miliband made his move within hours of Brown’s departure in May 2010, the first candidate to declare himself in the leadership contest.
His rise from Downing Street backroom boy to Foreign Secretary in six years had already been dramatic. Though seen as the young heir to Blairism by some sections of the Party, he refused to stand against Brown after Blair’s departure in 2007; and was rewarded with his appointment as the youngest Foreign Secretary since David Owen in 1977.
As Brown’s Government sank in popularity, he became the regular subject of speculation as a likely successor, or even challenger. In 2008 his Guardian article calling for a Labour revival betrayed disillusion with his Prime Minister and was widely interpreted as preparing the ground for a bid for the leadership.
But that prospect was greeted with scant enthusiasm by party members, the unions or the public. A month later he was pledging his loyalty to Brown in the face of calls by some Labour MPs for a leadership contest.
In the leadership crisis of the following June he considered resigning along with James Purnell and some other ministers, a move which might have finished Brown, but decided to remain loyal. But his admission that he had even thought about it was seen as a further destabilisation of Brown’s position.
But he can only have benefited from his refusal to challenge Brown, something he said he never intended to do. He had policy clashes with Brown, and sometimes won them. First out of the trap in the race to succeed Brown, he was receiving the endorsements of senior figures like Alan Johnson even before he declared his candidacy.
He has remained the apparent front-runner in the campaign, securing the support of seventy-five MPs, including the icon of the Left Jon Cruddas. He named his campaign “Movement for Change”, urging the Party not to retreat into a left-wing “comfort zone”, a comment seen as a swipe at his brother and rival Ed.
A very tall, very bright, Blairite intellectual, who looks even younger than his years, he parachuted straight from the Prime Minister's Policy Unit (where he was known as “Brains”) into South Shields at the last minute in 2001. The much put upon ex-Cabinet Minister David Clark had been tempted out of the super-safe seat with a peerage.
Within four years Miliband was in the Cabinet, where he spent much of his time denying that he had any intention of challenging for the leadership, despite constant wishful talk in the media and among Brown’s opponents.
Nobody believed the powerful New Labour thinker would remain a humble Tyneside backbencher for long. Within a year, at the age of thirty-six, he was in the Government, promoted straight to the middle-ranking position of Schools Minister.
In 2004 he moved to the Cabinet Office to be Alan Milburn's number two, working on policy for the general election. After the election he added some intellectual stiffening to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, as Minister for Communities and Local Government.
He now had a seat at the Cabinet table, and before long had a Department of his own to go with it. In 2006 he succeeded Margaret Beckett as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. A year later he succeeded her again, to become Foreign Secretary at the age of forty-one.
He was quick to distance the new regime from Tony Blair’s foreign policy, especially his closeness to George Bush and the Iraq war, which he had supported at the time. But it was difficult to see what had actually changed. His response to the Russian intervention in Georgia was criticised by some as insufficiently robust.
Launching what he called the second wave of New Labour foreign policy, he conceded that errors had been made in Iraq and said good intentions were not enough to ensure a peaceful solution, but stopped short of apologising for the war.
He was after all the head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit throughout the 1997 Parliament, where he was very close to the Prime Minister. Before that he was the Labour Party's policy director, in the Leader of the Opposition's office.
Born in 1965, he is the elder son of Ralph Miliband, a Marxist intellectual and influential writer who died in 1994. He went from Haverstock Comprehensive School in London to take first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and then an MSc in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In between he worked for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.
In 1992 he helped to write speeches for Neil Kinnock, became secretary of the Social Justice Commission, then a research Fellow for the Institute of Public Policy Research.
He wrote Reinventing the Left in 1994 for the IPPR, and spoke in 1999 on modernising central government and the Policy Unit's role in it. He is a member of the TGWU and founder of the Centre for European Reform. In 2001 he was appointed to a panel on the future of Europe.
At South Shields he won the selection contest overwhelmingly, from a shortlist imposed by the National Executive, with 184 votes to his nearest challenger’s 35. He said he was humbled by the backing he received and promised to work for every vote.
The South Tyneside electorate responded without enthusiasm. Fewer than half of them voted, and there was a 5.3 per cent swing to the Conservatives. But that was academic. In an excellent maiden speech he revealed that a predecessor as MP for South Shields, J Chuter Ede, Home Secretary in the Atlee Labour Government, had refused his Polish-born Jewish grandfather permission to stay in Britain after the Second World War.
One of the “Miliband of brothers”, who managed to keep feet in both the Blairite and Brownite camps, he was joined in the House of Commons by his younger brother Ed, former special adviser to Brown, elected MP for Doncaster North in 2005. Two years later Ed joined him at the top table as Cabinet Office Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, later as Energy and Climate Change Secretary, and finally as his rival for the leadership.
In 1998 he married Louise Shackleton, violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra. They live in Primrose Hill, North London. In 2004 they flew to America, where Mrs Miliband had grown up, to adopt a baby boy, Isaac James. The British Association for Fostering and Adoption raised questions about the case, but claims that they might have been given preferential treatment were discredited. In 2007 they adopted a second son, Jacob, also from America.
In 2000 the Guardian rated David Miliband, then still a policy adviser, number forty-six in a list of the most powerful people in Britain. It said: “He has helped shape policy on issues like welfare reform and education, and the Third Way.” He is credited, or blamed, for inventing the term “stakeholding”. He played a large part – advisory in his words – in drafting the 1997, 2001 and 2005 manifestos.
Frequently lampooned and described as “geeky”, he may yet have the last laugh.
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