LONDON — For months, Ed Miliband has been Andy Burnham’s most powerful and most useful friend in Westminster.
Now, as Burnham readies himself to enter Downing Street on Monday, what to do with Miliband might be his biggest dilemma.
More than a decade after Miliband, then Labour leader, suffered a bruising defeat at the U.K.’s 2015 general election, he has emerged as a kingmaker in Burnham’s rush to power — and is now looking to trade up from his current role as energy secretary to something bigger under Burnham.
Miliband has been speaking to Burnham behind the scenes since early 2026, according to two people familiar with the relationship between the men, and publicly called for Burnham’s return to Westminster as early as January. In April he was — according to reports never denied by Miliband’s team — the first Cabinet minister privately to urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to lay out a timetable for departure.
He has been “the godfather of Andy’s return,” says John McTernan, a Miliband backer and former adviser to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Yet few British politicians split opinion like Miliband, and his bid to be named chancellor inspired widespread pushback.
For some of the U.K.’s most influential right-leaning newspapers, he is the bogeyman of left-wing politics. His net zero project and a ban on new oil and gas exploration licenses in the North Sea have annoyed some unions. The Trump administration, full of enthusiastic backers for more fossil fuel drilling, reportedly warned against him becoming chancellor. (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Now — though people close to Burnham insist no final decision has been “communicated” — it is Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood who looks set to be named chancellor, emerging from a crowded field only after weeks of internal debate — and leaving open the question of where Miliband will fit in Burnham’s new order.
The options include replacing Yvette Cooper as foreign secretary, according to some reports. If so, he already has some fans. Miliband would be “formidable” on the global stage if handed the role, one senior diplomat from a G20 country told POLITICO.
What’s eating Ed?
The first signs that Miliband may have been thinking about life after Keir Starmer came by the banks of the River Mersey.
In September 2025, at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, the energy secretary used appearances at fringe events to roam beyond his policy brief, openly criticizing some right-leaning aspects of Starmer’s record.
“In the end,” he told an on-stage interviewer during conference week, “you’ve got to take on the idea that the problems … in this country are all to do with immigration. … It’s just wrong. You’ve got to have an argument about what has really gone wrong with Britain. … We haven’t done it enough.” Six months before, Starmer had earned the ire of left-leaning MPs and campaigners after warning that an unreformed immigration system could make the U.K. “an island of strangers.”
Burnham was also the talk of the Liverpool conference bars that September, following an interview with The New Statesman magazine where he effectively set out an alternative program for government, centered on devolution and greater public control of utilities.
Burnham was “really talented” and “right about reform of Westminster and reform of the political system,” Miliband said warmly. He also staunchly backed Starmer: “Keir is my friend, my longstanding friend. I’m Keir’s guy, I’m for Keir.”
But behind the scenes, the party was already moving against the prime minister.
“Since the back end of last year, most people in the Labour Party, even Keir’s supporters, thought summer 2026 would be the moment when Keir would go,” said one Miliband ally, like others in this article granted anonymity to speak frankly. “They could see the [heavy defeats in] local elections, Scotland and Wales coming months in advance.”
When jostling began to replace Starmer, former Housing Secretary Angela Rayner was seen as the Labour left’s leading pick for PM. But her leadership credentials were dented by an investigation into her tax affairs, creating anxiety on the left about who their candidate might be.
Miliband himself, the same ally said, “came to a very correct and quite self-knowing conclusion about that — that he wasn’t the right person.”
Even some of his most ardent backers agreed. “It wouldn’t work,” said one leading net-zero campaigner at that 2025 Labour conference, citing Miliband’s media image, which has never fully recovered from the 2015 defeat. “The backlash in the media, and then in the public, would be too much.”
Asked about his leadership ambitions that conference week, Miliband said “No” eight times. “Definitely not. I don’t know how many times I can say no.”
But his itch for a different kind of government was plain to see.
“What is the fucking point of politics?” he asked during the interview cited above. “The point of politics is to go out and argue for things. The point of politics is to go out with ideals.”
The fighter
Miliband has always liked a row.
“It was a tough but also a quite ruthless decision to decide to make the space possible for Andy,” said the ally quoted above.
For him “everything is a fight,” agreed a senior government official who has worked with Miliband.
“I’m not sure where that comes from. Probably it was learned at the Miliband family table,” they added, a reference to Miliband’s parents: Ralph Miliband, a leading Marxist intellectual, and Marion Kozak, a socialist campaigner and Holocaust survivor who died, aged 91, this May.
Miliband’s parents’ early life, and the terrible suffering and loss endured in particular by Marion in Nazi-occupied Poland, gives him “a clear sense of why politics matters, why you have to fight for ideas,” said a second ally.
Miliband fought and won against his older brother, David, who he defeated in the 2010 Labour leadership contest. David is also tipped for a potential job under Burnham. But for most Labour MPs, it is the fate of the younger Miliband that matters.
Some inside Westminster still harbor deep reservations about Miliband, though.
“[Miliband] pretends that he doesn’t want to be prime minister, and it’s not all his ego. And he presents this image of having been there and done that as a party leader,” said one former senior official. “There’s something quite fake about it. … He’s obsessed with the idea of Ed Miliband.”
But, argued Mcternan, Miliband is with the Burnham program: “Burnhamism, Manchesterism is an ideology that says: The world’s changing, so we’re going to do some things. Reduce inequality, decentralize, devolve, reindustrialize. … [Miliband] gets that we’re in the second quarter of the twenty-first century and we need new approaches.”
Spokespeople in both Miliband’s and Burnham’s teams declined to comment.
‘A very good export product’
Whichever way he turns, Burnham’s decision is being watched around the world.
Trump may not be a fan, but Miliband has “a formidable network of politicians, both in the U.K. and abroad,” noted the first former official. (In February he secured a meeting in London to talk clean energy with California governor and Democrat presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom.)
“He would make a formidable foreign secretary,” said a senior diplomat from a G20 country — a promotion which would allow Burnham to give Miliband more prominence but not the full power and heft of the Treasury.
“You could say [Miliband is] a very good export product,” the senior diplomat continued. “The perception of him outside the U.K. is very positive. He [is] very cosmopolitan, very cultivated. He treats countries with respect as equals, including less developed countries. He is post-imperial — a very modern politician with a sense of intergenerational responsibility.”
As foreign secretary or as chancellor, that could be significant next year, the diplomat noted, as the U.K. hosts G20 meetings, including a meeting of finance ministers to help shape a global response to the Iran energy shock and sclerotic global growth.
A trip to China to talk up clean energy investments last March does not harm his case, either, some argue. Miliband had “built some relationships” with counterparts at the global superpower, said Yixian Sun, a professor of sustainability governance at the University of Bath who recently advised the government on its engagement with China. His “commitment to strengthening cooperation between the two countries” would “definitely help the U.K.” if he had a bigger job, Sun added.
But ultimately, a third senior government official said, whoever ends up in the top jobs would be bound by the same political and economic gravity as his recent predecessors, none of whom have found a way to solve Britain’s basic conundrum: How to deliver sustained growth while balancing the books.
“This government is going to have a very challenging early period,” this former official said.
“They’ve got a lot of big issues to face in the autumn Budget [and] they’ve not had a lot of time to prepare or plan. … [whoever is chancellor] would be very constrained in fiscal policy, on tax, on borrowing, on spending. The parameters for them moving are quite narrow.”
Burnham’s problems are ultimately bigger and harder to solve even than personnel decisions, they argued.
“Ed or not Ed … it can get a bit overblown.”
Esther Webber contributed to this report.
