The party seems to have woken up to its need for an old-style intellectual heavyweight to counter the vacuousness of recent years
N
ature 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.
Having quietly leapfrogged Angela Rayner last month as the membership’s favourite cabinet minister, he could probably win a leadership contest tomorrow if it wasn’t for the fact that Labour MPs are putting all that on ice for now, realising that interrupting a global crisis for a summer of hustings would look faintly insane. For now, the job is to make the best of what they’ve got.
