The ideologically-driven Foreign Secretary appears to have no understanding of realpolitik
Daily Telegraph 21/08/26
“Speak softly and carry a big stick” – that was the art of diplomacy according to Theodore Roosevelt.
“Speak aggressively and carry a tiny stick” – that’s the new version according to Ed Miliband.
The Foreign Secretary this week waded in over a controversial new settlement in the West Bank. Israel wants to build 1,200 homes there. Miliband called it an “unacceptable and destructive act”. The Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, rejected his “patronising” statement.
The settlers in the West Bank have indeed behaved appallingly. And no one could accuse Miliband of being anti-Semitic. Jewish himself, he has ancestors on both sides that were killed in the Holocaust.
But the point is he’s intervening in a situation Britain has no leverage in. Upsetting diplomatic relations to no effect is next to useless. The art of diplomacy is more sophisticated and wily than that. As Sir Henry Wotton, an English diplomat, said in 1604: “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”
Miliband has no understanding of realpolitik – the art of the possible, rather than the art of the ideological. At the age of 56, he’s still Rick from the Young Ones – the pin-badge-wearing student politician.
It was the same when he was energy secretary, from 2024 to 2026. His mighty ambitions to achieve net zero mean nothing when Britain only produces one per cent of global emissions. We bankrupt ourselves, with sky-rocketing fuel bills, refusing to open new North Sea oilfields, while the rest of the world blithely ignores Miliband’s idealistic aims.
I saw the same approach growing up in Islington in the early 1980s, when the borough bravely declared itself a nuclear-free zone. If the Russians started bombing, they would of course spare north London.
When I see Ed Miliband swimming on Hampstead Heath in the freezing water in winter, I’m impressed by his toughness. He wears just a pair of swimming trunks while I put on a wetsuit. But he also reminds me of Mrs Dutt-Pauker – the rich Hampstead socialist, created by the late Michael Wharton (1913-2006), aka Peter Simple, in the Daily Telegraph.
Mrs Dutt-Pauker lived, like Ed Miliband, in a vast Hampstead pile. Hers was called “Marxmount”, named after Karl Marx. Miliband lives with his wife, the Hon Mrs Justice Thornton, a High Court Judge, in a sprawling house in nearby Dartmouth Park.
They were disastrously photographed in their second kitchen when he was Leader of the Opposition. They will have no problem paying their soaring fuel bills. The same doesn’t go for Miliband’s constituents in Doncaster North.
This is the sort of comfortable life Miliband has enjoyed since childhood, growing up in Primrose Hill in his parents’ charming villa, which his brother David Miliband, also once foreign secretary, took over before moving to New York as head of the International Rescue Committee, now on a salary said to be £1m a year.
In their gilt-lined bubbles, the Milibands can afford to stick with the student politics of their Oxford years and never be mugged by reality. And Ed has extra insulation from the necessities of realpolitik. It seems he was made Foreign Secretary by Andy Burnham as a sop for not getting his coveted job as chancellor – where his student politics would have brought even more carnage.
And so, in return for not kicking up a fuss at not getting what he wanted, he can defy the conventions of diplomacy.
Miliband’s politics are a version of what Kingsley Amis called “how it will go down at the club”. Instead of thinking about the general public, this type of person wonders how his ideas will go down “in the circle of his colleagues, his friends in the profession, certain critics and a more or less specialised and expert section of the public”.
Amis was talking about architects who built hideous buildings and writers who wrote baffling thrillers to impress their in-crowd of mates. But the same principle applies to politicians who satisfy their amour-propre and the pals in their bubble.
Miliband is adored down the club. But he won’t make the tiniest difference in bringing down global emissions – or changing the miserable situation in the West Bank.
Harry Mount is author of Odyssey – Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus
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