One cannot help but have conflicted feelings about reports that Ed Miliband is quietly touting himself as Britain’s next chancellor. He deserves it, but we don’t.

He doesn’t “deserve” the role in the normal sense, given that he has hardly earned the right to stewardship of the nation’s finances. During his time as Energy Secretary, Miliband has specialised in enormous acts of national self-harm by crippling Britain’s North Sea oil and gas sector and proposing to bury its entire stockpile of civil plutonium (the world’s largest).

No, he deserves the illusion-shattering consequences which surely await him behind the door of Number 11 — to be given the highest economic power in the land and see what actually happens when he tries to act out his fantasies. He deserves it, in other words, the same way Liz Truss did.

The whole scenario is baffling. According to the Telegraph, rebel Labour backbenchers believe they might be able to force Keir Starmer to install Miliband as chancellor following what looks set to be a miserable set of local elections, after which they expect to be able to “extract major concessions”.

But what concessions? On policy, that is, not personnel. The “soft Left”, to use the Labour parlance, has already broken the back of Starmer’s ministry. Rachel Reeves was forced into a humiliating U-turn from a very mild welfare reduction, and is now so cowed that ahead of the most recent Budget she defined the choice as between tax rises and cuts to capital budgets. Cuts to revenue budgets, such as welfare, were clearly off the table.

In the year and a half since the July 2024 vote, Starmer and Reeves’s solemn pre-election promise not to raise taxes on ordinary working people has been shredded, replaced instead by a desperate scrabble for revenue which is sucking what little life remains out of the economy. All of this compounded by that other soft-Left favourite, the Employment Rights Bill.

So what does the Energy Secretary think he could do differently? “Friends of Mr Miliband” are reportedly keen to emphasise his experience at the Treasury under Gordon Brown. But Brown inherited a strongly growing, low-tax economy in 1997 and spent a decade delivering a pandemic-level increase in public spending, in peacetime.

Even were his protégé minded to follow that example, it simply isn’t possible to replicate New Labour in today’s economic conditions. Tony Blair’s secret sauce — not nearly so remarkable in retrospect — was to keep hiking public spending without asking the public to pay for it. But both taxation and public spending, not to mention the cost of borrowing, are vastly higher now.

Unfortunately for British voters, this soft-Left approach to the economy isn’t going away. Labour increasingly expects a challenge to Starmer after next year’s local elections, and Lucy Powell’s victory in October’s deputy leadership contest showed where the balance of power lies. That’s why Wes Streeting has popped up in today’s papers talking about the need to rejoin a customs union with the EU.

It might, in the long run, be good for Labour — and indeed the country — if its most self-indulgent wing got everything it wanted and suffered the consequences. It’s just a shame that when Britain’s leaders have lessons to learn, voters must suffer the consequences along with them.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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