I can’t remember any cabinet member – of any party – so blatantly shaming a colleague. Cabinet members are supposed to show collective responsibility. Or at least, collective tolerance.
All that breaks down when comes to Ed Miliband.
On Question Time, health Secretary Streeting blasted Ed’s decision to oppose military action against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad when Labour leader in 2013.
Why would Streeting stick the boot in like that? I suspect his outburst had been brewing for some time. There’s just something about Ed that brings out the worst in people.
I felt it myself. Shortly after the election, I lost it after seeing Mililband’s infuriating Twitter video, which shows him warbling Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind while waving a ukulele and gleefully threatening to vandalise the English countryside with wind turbines, solar farms and pylons.
I gave it six months before Miliband drove the rest of us mad and got kicked out of the cabinet.
We’re into month five but there’s still time.
Ed Miliband first came to public notice when he stole the Labour leadership from under the nose of his far more qualified brother David in 2010.
Stiffing your own brother like that just isn’t on. And once you’ve done it, you have to win. Instead, ‘Red Ed’ steered Labour to political annihilation in 2015, while famously losing a fight with a bacon sandwich along the way.
Today, Miliband defended his decision to veto action against the vile Assad. He didn’t apologise or show a shred of regret over a decision that potentially cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Just as he didn’t show any regret over costing his brother the chance to be PM.
No wonder he’s so infuriating.
His jokey response to questions over how he spent more than £40,000 of taxpayer cash refurbishing his offices was also maddening.
As was the offhand way he shut down a raft of North Sea oil and gas exploration licences that will potentially cost hundreds of thousands of energy sector jobs.
Miliband doesn’t care about other people. He only listens to the noises in his head.
Miliband’s fanatical attachment to his net-zero agenda is driving up energy prices, increasing business costs and undermining our economic competitiveness. Yet he keeps pretending it’s going swimmingly.
Which is annoying.
Miliband doesn’t live on the same planet as the rest of us. That may be a legacy of his childhood, growing up as the son of Marxist academic Ralph Miliband.
Ed was raised with a head full of impractical left-wing ideas that will never work in the real world.
Wes Streeting is the sole Labour front bencher who gives the impression of living in the same world as the rest of us.
This isn’t his first public swipe at Miliband. His first came in a quip about new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, where he accused her of “repeating all the mistakes we made in opposition”, then concluded with: “Kemi, carry on like this and you’ll be Energy Secretary in 10 years’ time.”
He’s been using Ed as a punchline for months.
Keir Starmer is busily watering down Miliband’s more ridiculous targets, such as his fantastical pledge to deliver 100% clean energy by 2030.
While Ed remains in post, Labour’s chance of winning the next election is even slimmer. Starmer surely can’t put up with him much longer. He’s not the only one.
