{"id":702356,"date":"2026-07-20T22:51:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T22:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/702356\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T22:51:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T22:51:12","slug":"foreign-secretary-job-is-honour-of-my-life-says-ed-miliband","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/702356\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreign secretary job is honour of my life, says Ed Miliband"},"content":{"rendered":"

He is best known as a former Labour leader – having beaten his brother David, among others, in the dramatic leadership contest that followed the party’s 2010 general election defeat.<\/p>\n

Support from the trade unions had proved decisive back then.<\/p>\n

Winning by just 1%, the younger Miliband took over the reigns of the party from acting leader Harriet Harman aged just 40 years old, in a vote he said marked a new generation of the Labour Party.<\/p>\n

David was offered a shadow cabinet role but opted to leave British politics altogether, taking up a job as the head of the International Rescue charity in New York in 2013.<\/p>\n

As leader, Ed Miliband wanted to move beyond the New Labour era, projecting a more left wing message on tax and inequality, and distancing himself from the Iraq War.<\/p>\n

He picked up supporters in the #milifandom<\/a>, an online campaign run by Abby Tomlinson, then 17-years-old, who posted photos of Miliband with floral wreaths photoshopped onto his head and referring to him as “Milibae”.<\/p>\n

However, he also made headlines for his appearance, with cartoonists regularly sketching him as Wallace, from the Wallace and Gromit animations, and a particularly unflattering photograph of him making a meal out of eating a bacon sandwich in 2014.<\/p>\n

There were also several gaffes, including the Edstone<\/a> – a 2.6m (8 ft 6 in) tall limestone tablet engraved with six policies on improving the economy, the NHS, cutting immigration, and building new homes.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the policies were overshadowed by mockery of the giant stone slab, which proved to be a tombstone for Miliband’s 2015 election hopes.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2021, Miliband said his biggest regret was “not the sandwich” – a reference to the infamous bacon sandwich photo – but “not speaking in primary colours about the changes I want to see”.<\/p>\n

“I have become bolder as I have become older,” he added.<\/p>\n

Miliband resigned to make way for Jeremy Corbyn, who led the party from 2015 to 2020, when Sir Keir took over as party leader in opposition.<\/p>\n

He returned to the political frontline under then-leader Sir Keir, first as shadow business secretary, and then shadow climate change and net zero secretary in 2021.<\/p>\n

Speaking that same year, Miliband told BBC Political Thinking he was still recovering from what he labelled a “gut wrenching” defeat that was “in many ways” a personal rejection of him.<\/p>\n

However, the 2024 Labour landslide under Sir Keir saw him tackling climate change with a renewed zeal in government, pushing a Green Prosperity Plan to invest in renewables and unlock new jobs and economic growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He is best known as a former Labour leader – having beaten his brother David, among others, in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-702356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}