Is Ed Miliband the most powerful man in Westminster?

“Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government”; we are ruled by Ed Miliband, said Michael Gove in The Spectator. The man who “messed it up” as Labour leader a decade ago now has “real power and popularity” within the cabinet, the unions and the wider party membership, said Will Lloyd in The New Statesman.

The energy security and net zero secretary may be facing huge pressure as the Iran war sends prices shocks through the global energy market but he seems to be doing so from an unassailable position in British politics.

Starmer is Miliband’s ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’

“Almost everything terrible that could be said” about Miliband has been said already, said Lloyd in The New Statesman. Now I hear “the confidence of someone who had been torched so many times” he can no longer feel fire. “His beliefs have deepened, not changed” and they have “influenced his colleagues, too, perhaps without them realising”. If Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner were to become Labour leader, they won’t “deviate from the script Miliband has written”. Nigel Farage has even “told friends privately” that he expects Miliband himself to become prime minister by 2027.

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I have news for anyone fears such a development, said Gove in The Spectator: this is already Miliband’s administration. Starmer’s foreign policy, economic policy, “political positioning” and “very quest for meaning” are “All. Ed. Miliband.” He has his hand up Starmer’s back “where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy”.

We all know that in last autumn’s reshuffle, Starmer tried to move Miliband from his current brief, but Miliband said no “and that was that”, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph. Starmer “dare not even ask” Miliband about his role in “deciding whether to exploit new oil and gas fields in the North Sea”. Doesn’t he know his job it to lead the government, not to wait for Miliband to tell him what to do?

‘Clown prince of the soft left’

Miliband was the “leader who broke Labour – and in doing so, broke Britain”, said Sarah Ditum in The i Paper. “He entrenched” the party’s “worst habits of self-loathing and internal schism”, lost one general election, and “set the stage for even worse”. His “miserable tenure” promptly ushered in the Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour put up “only a vague shrug” of opposition to Brexit.

But by appointing him to the cabinet, Starmer has “treated Miliband as an elder statesman, rather than the clown prince of the soft left”. Handing the energy brief “to a man whose history as leader is a catalogue of incompetence” may well ensure a “catastrophic swing back to fossil fuels under a Reform government”.

The departures of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney mean Miliband has “finally won” the tussle between New Labour/Blue Labour and the soft left, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Starmer is “still quite likely to fall”, and any subsequent leadership battle “can only be held or won from the Ed Miliband position”. What Labour’s “lost leader” stands for is “irresistible within the party”. Miliband “will be its most important political force, whatever his formal job”.