This week Ed Miliband made his first trip to Washington D.C. since becoming Andy Burnham’s Foreign Secretary. He is 56 now, an MP of more than 20 years’ standing in his fourth cabinet role, yet there is something both boyish and gauche about him: the eternal younger brother. How would he fare as Britain’s envoy to President Trump and the cult of Maga?
Miliband had been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the pair met at an Association of South East Asian Nations foreign ministers’ conference in the Philippines last month. It had been rumoured that the Trump administration was disappointed at Burnham’s selection of Miliband as Foreign Secretary, insofar as it is possible to imagine President Trump displaying much interest in the matter at all.
Miliband’s enthusiasm for net zero targets and his opposition to new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea were anathema in Washington. The US Secretary of Energy, former oil industry CEO Chris Wright – who has said ‘there is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either’ – supposedly nicknamed his then-counterpart ‘Miliwatt’. The new Foreign Secretary had also previously accused Trump of being ‘a racist and a misogynist’ who ‘lowered the bar for idiocy’.
