This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
When a fresh-faced Ed Miliband became energy secretary for the first time nearly two decades ago, his opening act was to strike a red pen through the key climate target he’d inherited — and massively increase it.
In place of a promise to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, already seen as a stretch, he upped it to 80 per cent. It was late 2008, and crashing financial markets had just set Britain on course for recession and soaring unemployment — hardly the time for costly new commitments. But none of that stopped the neophyte minister. Economic difficulties were no excuse to “row back” on the commitment to tackle global warming, he said.
It was what Sir Humphrey might have called a “brave decision”, and one that embroiled Miliband in many fights with fellow ministers when its implications became clear, not least when he set out to hobble Gordon Brown’s 2009 plan to get the economy moving by building a third runway at Heathrow Airport. But age and experience haven’t dimmed Miliband’s Jacobin zeal for climate action.
Roll forward to the present and he is at it again, this time with a plan to decarbonise the electricity network. The new energy secretary wants this to happen not by 2035 as his Conservative predecessors had promised — but by 2030, just five years away.
It’s a target most energy experts regard as wildly reckless. Thanks in part to a massive increase in renewable energy, Britain already has the highest electricity prices amongst the world’s advanced economies. The list of energy-intensive manufacturers shutting down is lengthening: Ineos is turning its Grangemouth refinery into an import terminal, the nation’s steel industry is on life support, and the last fertiliser plant has closed. Most think that Miliband’s plan would make things much worse.
“What a sprint to the 2030 target means is that, if taken seriously, the UK must pay whatever it costs to commandeer the necessary equipment for the supply chains and the necessary skilled labour, as well as whatever returns investors demand, too,” says the energy economist, Dieter Helm.
He was often seen as an ineffectual figure of fun, likened to Wallace from the Wallace and Gromit films
Those who know Miliband, now aged 55, say he’s sincere about the mission. “Ed totally believes in the 2030 target — that the UK is going to set an example for the rest of the world. He believes we have to go for it and show it can be done,” says Nick Butler, a former BP executive who was an energy adviser to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister. To demonstrate his seriousness, Miliband has, in a whirlwind of announcements, already called an end to all new exploration in the North Sea, indicated he’ll prevent production starting at the Rosebank field, recently developed at a cost of £3.1bn, and swept aside objections to a number of onshore renewable projects.
His single-minded drive is sending shockwaves through the Labour government. And in the wake of Rachel Reeves’s calamitous budget, the battle lines have hardened. The embattled chancellor announced in January that growth is the “government’s number one mission” and “trumps” net zero. To prove the point, she even exhumed the cobwebbed old project to expand Heathrow Airport.
The face-off between chancellor and energy secretary could define, or even derail, Keir Starmer’s young administration, which desperately craves growth but is also driven by a lawyerish desire to meet climate commitments — even at a time when other countries, such as Donald Trump’s United States, are shredding theirs. “Which way Keir comes down could decide the fate of the next election,” says one adviser, who admits that accommodating both visions “looks like a circle it’s very hard to square”.
Those who remember Miliband from his second incarnation — as leader of the Labour opposition from 2010 to 2015 — might be surprised to find him such a consequential player in Starmer’s Cabinet. Then he was often seen as an ineffectual figure of fun, his appearance likened to that of the hapless Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films.
In 2014, a photograph of him somewhat ineptly eating a bacon sandwich went viral to much hilarity.
A year later, just before the 2015 election, he provoked more mockery by posing before a bizarre piece of masonry — dubbed the “Ed Stone” — carved with six campaign pledges, which he promised to erect in the Downing Street garden if he became prime minister.
Friends say that period was an unhappy one for Miliband, and an uncharacteristic interlude politically. Having won the leadership by defeating his own elder brother, David (who had been expected to win), and somewhat trashing their previously close relationship, he struggled to define his own political mission.
The real Ed, his friends claim, is much more of a political campaigner
Miliband wanted to move the party leftwards from Tony Blair’s New Labour, whose model of relying on taxes from a lightly regulated City of London to fund redistribution had burned out spectacularly in 2008. But he could never assemble a team or set of policies to define a coherent destination. “Ed’s not the sort of person who is energised by the managerial side of politics,” says Stewart Wood, a close friend and one-time adviser to Gordon Brown. “You know, systems, that’s not his greatest contribution.” Miliband dialled back the geeky radicalism, trying to prove to a sceptical country he’d be a safe bet as prime minister. Dogged by ridicule he failed, and went down to heavy defeat.
The real Ed, his friends claim, is much more of a political campaigner. Growing up in North London in the 1980s, he was much influenced by his father, Ralph, a socialist academic and grandee of the so-called “New Left”, which favoured direct action to advance social causes and strongly opposed the Vietnam War.
At Oxford, Miliband became president of the junior common room at Corpus Christi college, where his proudest moment was organising a rent strike. “My best four weeks at university,” he called it, adding that whilst he “wasn’t particularly bookish, what got me going was student activism and mobilising people”.
The theme continued after he earned his spurs as a spad and entered parliament. His first ministerial role came in 2006, when Blair made him charities minister and he got first-hand exposure to the world of NGOs. It was one to which he was “ideally suited”, said his biographer Mehdi Hasan, adding that through his enthusiastic engagement with the voluntary sector, Miliband forged “an early, progressive version of what David Cameron would later claim as his trademark mission for a “Big Society’”.
When Brown moved him to the climate change brief in 2008, he treated the Copenhagen climate conference as a grander version of the Corpus Christi rent strike. His spad, Polly Billington, created a website, “Ed’s Pledge”, that allowed the public to show their support for efforts to get a deal at the conference, whilst his ministry’s top civil servant, Moira Wallace, referred to it in a leaked memo as a “campaigning department”.
Environmental activists were delighted to find a minister speaking their language. “He charmed the pants off all the green groups,” said the writer and campaigner Mark Lynas. Two decades on, he’s still hanging out with campaigners. Milband’s chief of staff, Tobias Garnett, was formerly legal adviser to Extinction Rebellion, whilst another spad, Eleanor Salter, has described the hardline climate group as “a great accelerator of activism”.
Miliband’s second coming to the energy and climate change brief aims to surpass even the hyperactive green activism that characterised his first which saw the passing of the 2008 Climate Change Act that entrenched emissions targets in national law. His time as leader rammed home the point that all political careers are fragile. Wood describes him as a man in a hurry who is “determined to shift the equilibrium of the country towards renewables and make it difficult for the fossil-fuel enthusiasts to reverse”.
This isn’t just a technical exercise aimed at reducing carbon in the atmosphere. It’s also an expression of Miliband’s political credo: the radicalism he inherited from his father, which aspires to reform capitalism as a whole. “We do not just need to preserve our world for future generations; we need to hand over a fairer world,” he said in the Ralph Miliband memorial lecture he gave to the London School of Economics in November 2009, just before the Copenhagen conference. “We need a politics of climate change that speaks to people’s idealism as well as their wallets.”
The vehicle for this vaulting ambition is a “Green Prosperity Plan” that will, its authors claim, create “hundreds of thousands of jobs” building the green technology and grid the country will need. Miliband has thrown himself into promoting it, posting slick videos almost daily on Instagram and TikTok, outlining the latest steps and extolling their virtues.
For all the talk about idealism, the plan contains a hefty appeal to the wallet, promising to bring electricity bills down sharply on the dubious assumption that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. Miliband has even given an oddly precise figure, from a green consultancy, that they will fall by £300 by 2030. If this were the case, it might go a way to answering Miliband’s critics that his plans will bankrupt the country.
However, many experts believe the estimate to be based on implausibly high estimates of future gas prices. “It would be wonderful if it were true [that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels], but sadly it isn’t any time soon,” says Dieter Helm.
How successful Miliband will be in achieving his vision depends in large part on his relationship with Starmer. The two are close, and Ed was instrumental, many claim, in shoe-horning the Prime Minister into the plum safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras. Climate policy also sits well with Starmer’s enthusiasm for human rights and international commitments. “Keir is very supportive of climate change being a defining theme for what the government does,” says Wood. “It’s also worth remembering that Ed provides political cover on the left if he has to make some hard choices about positioning the party before the next election.”
Those predicting Miliband’s early demise may be disappointed. In a cabinet not conspicuously long on political nous or heavyweight experience, he stands out as one of the few with a scoped-out plan who is also well versed in the dark arts of Whitehall, and how to play the system. He might have lost a battle with Reeves when she spiked a commitment to spend £28bn a year on green projects, but few think he has lost the war. “Ed put up quite a fight and what emerged was a party committed to a very detailed set of things,” says an insider. “The level of detail in the manifesto to green investment is way beyond the detail on anything else. It’s like a divorce contract.”
Colleagues see the 2030 goal as a “stretch target” rather than a resigning issue. (Miliband has already described as “ridiculous” the idea that he would quit over Heathrow expansion.) Ed, they say, isn’t someone who throws his toys out of the pram if he doesn’t get everything he wants. He didn’t resign over Heathrow expansion in 2009, despite the Cabinet approving it. “And look what happened,” says one gleefully. “Heathrow didn’t get expanded, did it?”
Whilst Reeves conjures her spacious but potentially empty visions of new airport runways and the “Oxford–Cambridge arc”, Miliband is building his in steel and concrete — one wind turbine at a time. For those Labour politicians who think Starmer should be laser-focused on growth and “re-shoring” industrial jobs back to the UK, this mismatch is a source of worry. Jon Cruddas, a former Labour MP and one-time Miliband ally, frets about it opening the door to “Farage running around places like Grangemouth blaming Labour for not caring about workers’ jobs”.
This is not just a spectre; it is already happening as ever more hard-pressed industries threaten closures. If Starmer doesn’t ultimately find a way to square the circle, his party might do it for him. “This could fracture Labour’s brittle coalition,” Cruddas warns.
