Is Ed Miliband, Labour’s green conscience, about to be dumped?

If Keir Starmer decides that his energy secretary is a liability – after former PM Tony Blair warned that his net zero policies are costing the party votes – he’s a goner, says John Rentoul

If Tony Blair was trying to push Ed Miliband out of the government with his criticism of phasing out fossil fuels too quickly, it was political rather than personal.

“It’s not that I don’t like Ed, because I do,” the former prime minister told students at King’s College London last month, when he explained that he thought the 2010 leadership election was “really significant”.

He said that “if Labour had chosen the other Miliband brother”, it would have been “a credible contender in the 2015 election”, but that Ed “was not in the right policy place to win”.

Blair evidently still thinks that, and believes that the energy secretary’s policies are a potential liability for Labour at the next election. He wrote in the foreword to his institute’s paper on climate change policy this week: “Voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal.”

But does Keir Starmer agree with him?

He appeared not to. His spokesperson told journalists on Wednesday that the prime minister “absolutely” had confidence in Miliband as energy secretary. “He’s doing a fantastic job, winning the global race for the jobs of the future and securing people’s energy bills.”

The problem is that Starmer has often been absolutely, definitely and totally in favour of things that he later turned out not to be in favour of at all. In February last year, two days before he and Rachel Reeves dropped the plan to invest £28bn a year in green projects, he said it was “desperately needed”.

Last month, he told an international summit on energy security at Lancaster House that “the clean energy transition” was “in the DNA of my government”. So it cannot be long before the government’s unrealistic targets for the transition are revised.

But how long? And will the coming course correction cost Miliband his job?

My view is that Miliband will not resign voluntarily. He has shown that he is prepared to compromise for the sake of the greater good, which is that he should be in the cabinet as Labour’s green conscience. He accepted the ditching of the £28bn. More recently, he accepted a third runway for Heathrow. Longer ago, in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, he also accepted a third runway – it was only in the 14 years in between that he was opposed.

Other compromises will present themselves as the costs of the drive to net zero become explicit. Reeves has made it clear that they will not be borne by the Treasury, and Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, and Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, will not allow them to be passed to consumers. Miliband will have to act as the government’s green shield as it retreats from some of its more ambitious targets.

At some point, however, Starmer may decide that he agrees with Blair that Miliband’s approach is a vote-loser and therefore a bar to genuine green progress. When Starmer’s spokesperson was asked if Miliband enjoyed the same job security as Reeves and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, who Starmer has said will stay in post for the whole of this parliament, the question was dodged: “The PM absolutely backs the energy secretary, as I said.”

So Miliband could be moved in the next shuffle, either in the summer or at the end of the year. It may be that Starmer will thank him for his hard work on the government’s net zero strategy and at Cop30, the next global climate summit in Brazil in November, offer him a different job, which he would turn down.

Miliband remains extremely popular among Labour members, coming top of the cabinet favourability league table by some distance in the Survation poll for Labour List last month, ahead of Angela Rayner, Hilary Benn and Lisa Nandy. But – irony of ironies – he no longer holds the sway among the trade unions that he once did.

Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, the union that delivered the Labour leadership to him in 2010 against the votes of party members for his brother, has come out this week in support of Blair on net zero.

Starmer has long been described as a friend of Miliband’s. As party leader, Miliband helped ensure that the former public prosecutor landed the safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras. But if Starmer has proved one thing since he arrived in parliament, it is that he is more ruthless than anyone thought possible.

If Starmer decides that Miliband is an electoral liability, therefore, he will go.