Ed Miliband

Profile

Edward Samuel Miliband (born 24 December 1969) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Doncaster North since 2005 and served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010, firstly as the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and then as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. He is the younger brother of David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary, and together the two were the first siblings to sit in Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley and his brother Oliver in 1938.

After graduating from Oxford University and the London School of Economics, Miliband became a Labour Party researcher and rose to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s confidants, being appointed Chairman of HM Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers. Miliband was elected Labour Member of Parliament for the South Yorkshire constituency of Doncaster North in the 2005 general election.

As Prime Minister, Brown appointed Miliband as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office in his first Cabinet on 28 June 2007. Miliband subsequently served as Secretary of State at the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change from 3 October 2008 to 11 May 2010.

Born in London, Miliband is the son of Polish Jewish immigrants Marion Kozak and the late Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband (a Brussels native whose parents were from Warsaw), who fled Belgium during World War II. He went to Haverstock Comprehensive School in the Chalk Farm area of London.

As a teenager, he reviewed films and plays on LBC Radio’s Young London programme as one of its “Three O’Clock Reviewers”, and worked as an intern to Tony Benn.[2] After completing his A Levels, he read PPE at Corpus Christi College, Oxford gaining a BA, and Economics at the LSE where he obtained an MSc.

After a brief career in television journalism, Miliband became a speechwriter and researcher for Labour politician Harriet Harman in 1993, and then for Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown the following year. In 1997, following Labour’s landslide election victory, Miliband was appointed as one of Gordon Brown’s special advisers with specific responsibility as a speechwriter.

In 2003–04, he spent a year’s sabbatical at Harvard University, to study and lecture at Harvard’s Centre for European Studies, during which time he was ‘granted access’ to Senator John Kerry and reported back to Brown on the Presidential hopeful’s progress. In 2004 he was appointed chairman of HM Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers, directing the UK’s long-term economic planning.

Source: Wikipedia

Labour Leadership Contest

Ed Miliband is one of five candidates to succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party:

1. David Miliband
2. Ed Miliband
3. Diane Abbott
4. Ed Balls
5. Andy Burnham

Further Information:

• Guardian Summary
• BBC Summary