Ed Miliband’s stock is rising because he’s a rare commodity in Labour these days: a thinker | Gaby Hinsliff

2026-03-27 - 06:19

The party seems to have woken up to its need for an old-style intellectual heavyweight to counter the vacuousness of recent years Nature famously abhors a vacuum. So when Morgan McSweeney departed government, leaving a hole where much of Keir Starmer’s thinking used to be, it was always going to be filled eventually. And increasingly, that filling looks Ed Miliband-shaped. The energy secretary’s influence has visibly grown in recent weeks, and not just because of a spiralling energy crisis in the Gulf. The idea that he is the real prime minister now – the one supposedly calling the shots over everything from whether Britain should join the war on Iran to how far it should pursue its “fatwa against fossil fuels”, as Michael Gove, the former Tory minister turned Spectator editor-in-chief, huffed recently – is on one level just another attempt by the opposition to humiliate Starmer, painting him as a lame-duck leader pushed around by underlings. But if the truth is a bit more nuanced than that, there’s no denying Miliband has grown in stature of late. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...