Ed Miliband is at war with Number 10 over its attempts to slash DESNZ’s budget by at least 1% to help fund the elusive Defence Investment Plan (DIP). According to the Telegraph, Miliband has gone studs up over demands to squeeze around £600m from the department. Will someone think of the heat pumps…
Currently, around £9 billion is set to be spent on carbon capture and storage alone. Miliband thinks this is a worthy investment, even as the DIP is around £4.5 billion short of the funding requested by the MoD. Is Ed aware that Britain’s Navy more or less doesn’t exist?
The ongoing cabinet wrangling over the DIP is increasingly regarded as an academic exercise within Labour circles anyway, given Starmer’s tenure in Number 10 is coming to an end. Although under the new regime, Miliband will still sit at the top table…
The fourth and final part of Guido’s horror series. Sorry Al Carns…
Ed Miliband is more or less pulling the strings nowadays anyway. But should Starmer fall, here’s what Miliband unleashed might look like…
Whether he’s in Number 10 or Number 11, this is what’s on the menu…
Miliband on Sky News this morning:
“As you know, I steered well clear of Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010… I had a conversation with David Lammy about it before the appointment, and I said I was worried about it… I think [Lammy] was worried about it too.”
A perfect time to remind everyone he thinks he has better judgement than the (current) Prime Minister. Useful if there’s a vacancy…
The Tony Blair Institute has staged yet another rare intervention against Miliband’s Net Zero fantasy, with a new report accusing him of being too “ideological” and urging the government to approve the drilling of the Jackdaw gas field and the Rosebank oilfield. This is the fourth time in a year that Blair has criticised Labour over Net Zero…
The report, endorsed by Blair himself, says:
“…the UK debate remains too ideological, with the government focused on decarbonising power supply only and the opposition on expanding domestic oil and gas.
“Neither confronts the central challenge: only around a fifth of UK energy demand is currently met through electricity, leaving the wider economy heavily dependent on fossil fuels”
Miliband’s friendly profile in the New Statesman last month revealed he keeps in regular contact with Gordon Brown… but not so much Blair. Old habits…
Steve Yemm has told GB News’s Christopher Hope that up to 40 of his fellow Labour MPs have written privately to senior Cabinet ministers demanding a rethink of Miliband’s plan to end sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Nearly one in ten of the PLP…
Speaking on Chopper’s Political Podcast, Yemm said:
“Some of us are really concerned because we meet with workers, we meet with management and we hear the same thing. There’s real unanimity around this question. Some of us are very concerned about jobs in our constituencies. And so, we are making our views known to government… We’re in a position where we’re being heard now, but it’s really important, of course, that we keep having that conversation and move it forward.”
Guido members will know plenty of Labour MPs were passing around Henry Tufnell’s Sun column earlier this week, which let rip over Miliband’s zealotry. Labour MPs who know this crusade is putting their own seats in jeopardy are getting braver in criticising it. If all the profiles on Miliband this week are anything to go by, the ‘real Prime Minister’ still isn’t interested…
Ed Miliband scores the cover interview for this week’s New Statesman. He finally joins the ever-growing list of Labour MPs who have, by pure coincidence, decided now is the time for a puff piece in which they pontificate about Labour’s problems, speak wistfully about their childhoods, and pose for weird pictures. If you want a job in the real world, you usually submit a CV. In Labour, you give a War and Peace-length interview to the New Statesman…
Miliband is careful not to mention his personal ambitions specifically. Luckily the New Statesman does it for him:
“Some of those who know Miliband are clear he has his eyes on becoming chancellor. Nigel Farage has told friends privately in recent weeks that he expects Miliband to become prime minister by 2027.”
Oh no, don’t put that in there…
He does at least admit he wants to smash the ming vase to pieces:
“We won on a modest, relatively safe platform,” Miliband went on. “That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s just a description of the facts.” Miliband mounts a defence of the government. Good things are happening, he promises.”
Most notable, however:
“Should Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner become the leader of Labour this year, they will not deviate from the script that Miliband has written.”
In other words: don’t forget who’s really running the show. He is even described as having “liquid charm“. The only line he might take issue with is his “remarkably enormous oblong of a head”…
Andy Haldane, Burnham’s recent adviser on the economy who has not taken up a No10 job, told Andrew Marr on LBC:
“The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax-and-spend socialist government with better TikTok videos…
imposing windfall taxes on oil & gas or on banks or upping capital gains tax would […] repeat the mistake that Rachel made […] The Achilles heel, the fiscal Achilles heel of this government thus far has been its unwillingness and/or inability to cut public spending.”