After Chancellor John Healey shed light on his own advice from Brown over the weekend, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the POLITICO Pub he and Brown’s most recent interaction was a phone chat while Miliband was in New York at the U.N. General Assembly. “I had a late-night phone call with him actually last week,” Miliband said. “They come thick and fast.”
Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander told us he felt like consoling Healey about Brown’s stream of ALL-CAPS messages by telling him “the first 35 years is the worst and then you get over it.”
3) We’re starting to tease out how Labour’s big beasts really see the world
Burnham’s ascent to the top of Labour saw a big changing of the guard in the U.K. cabinet.
Previously domestic-focused ministers Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting – both from rival schools in the Labour movement — are now turning their attention to the world outside Westminster and getting pinned down on the specifics.
In back-to-back POLITICO Pub interviews, Miliband — a Labour veteran who is now the U.K.’s foreign secretary — signalled a split with the Trump administration on the U.S. president’s bid to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G20 in Miami. And he risked disappointing some of his supporters on Labour’s soft-left by batting away suggestions the U.K. should stump up reparations to Commonwealth nations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Streeting, for his turn, came over a little Mark Rutte. In a line that could have been uttered by the NATO chief, who has stressed the need to give Trump a hearing on European defense spending, Streeting warned Britain and Europe to get out of their “defensive crouch.”