ASK PHILIPPA
David Miliband, 52, is on a mission to humanise the refugee crisis. Natasha Lunn meets the former Labour MP turned charity chief to talk Hillary, long-term love, and why parenting is harder than politics
Our agony aunt tackles your issues
Whenever David Miliband offers an opinion, people like to lament what could have been. During his TV and podcast appearances over the last few months, tweets have ranged from “The UK NEEDS
YOU for PM. Please come back!” to “Wouldn’t be in the mess we are now if he was Prime Minister,” and the question he so often has to swerve: “When are you coming back to British politics?” Of course, there are also some who label him a “Blairite,” or who take umbrage at his anti-brexit stance and $600,000-a-year salary. But for others, whose views sit somewhere in the middle of Theresa May’s strong and (not so) stable Conservatism and the Corbynites on the Left, Miliband senior is The One That Got Away. A little like the person you used to date but still think about in a “What would life have been like with them?” way. Could he have succeeded where Ed failed? For now, at least, it seems we’ll never know.
For anyone who missed the Shakesperean-esque political tragedy Miliband reluctantly took centre stage in seven years ago, here is a quick recap: David and his younger brother Ed ran against each other in the Labour leadership contest of
2010, going up against their own flesh and blood in dramatic fashion. While Ed won the battle (he narrowly won the contest and was Labour leader from 2010 to 2015), both seemingly lost the war (Ed lost the 2015 general election and the Conversatives have now been in power for over seven and a half years). Following his loss, David returned to the
backbenches until 2013, but writes of that time now, “My choice was silence or division. I didn’t want either… I needed to find a way to break out.” So he did – Miliband resigned from Parliament and moved to New York to take up a post as president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
The good news is that for the last four and a half years, he appears to have been having rather a good time – and not only because the move freed him from the Cain and Abel comparisons in the British press, where “anything I said was construed as a bitter attack on my brother”. In New York, we’ve watched him champion the refugee cause alongside Amal and George Clooney and Angela Merkel, hang out with his friend Hillary Clinton (who described him as “so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart”) and seemingly throw himself into the new job with gusto. His aim? To tackle the global refugee crisis.
It’s this mission that we’re discussing today, specifically his new book, Rescue: Refugees And
The Political Crisis Of Our Time. We meet in a brightly lit room at the back of the IRC’S London office, on Bloomsbury Place, where Miliband is huddled with some colleagues in the corner. “I’d like to see Chuka while I’m here,” he tells one as I enter the room. I consider asking if he’s planning a centrist coup with the Labour MP Umunna while he’s here, but decide that might be a bit punchy for question number one. So we begin with the book. Part call to arms, part collection of stories (including his own), it is a powerful invitation to care about refugees, to see them as humans, just like you or me, who desperately need our help. It opens with the words, “The first refugees I ever met were my parents,” pointing out Miliband’s personal connection to the crisis – both of his parents came to Britain as refugees from Nazi Europe and only survived because of the strangers who helped them.
In person, Miliband is both engaged and engaging. He is polished – sharp suit, firm handshake, black hair with a whitish tuft at the front – but wears his charisma without arrogance. In the age of the personality politician, he is quite the opposite – rational, deeply interested in policy, stats and details. And he is good company, even if I do get the feeling that he is often holding back, sidestepping questions with the ease of a politician who has had years of practice. But I get it. He’s been burned. He’s trying to move on and make a difference. Perhaps that’s why he once admitted the brothers agreed to “never to say anything new” about their relationship to the press, even swerving the personal when they appeared on
Ed’s podcast – the first time they had talked together publicly in seven years – last June.
Family feuds aside, the other big question Miliband often has to bat aside is when/if he’ll make a comeback to British politics. He’s had years to rehearse a non-committal answer, so
I try a different tack. I point out that nearly every interview with him reads like a game of cat and mouse, where the journalist tries to get the scoop on his return to the UK. Why does he not put an end to all the speculation by simply saying he’s not going to? “It’s because I haven’t decided what I want to do next,” he says matter of factly. “So why should I start saying: I’m going to do this or I’m not going to do that. Also, to be fair to me, I do always say, look, I am 1,000% focused on the job I’m doing. One of my own strengths or weaknesses, depending on your point of view, is… I tend to really embrace the thing I’m meant to be doing. It’s quite funny when 21 year olds come and say, ‘What should I do with my career?’ and I say, ‘I’m 52 and I don’t know what I’m doing with mine.’ So the reason I say it is that it’s the truth.”
For someone who isn’t currently in British politics, he’s not shy about commenting on it, as he did in a passionate and scathing article for The
Observer on Brexit last August. Why wade in to the debate? “If you’ve got things to say and people are willing to listen, it is sad not to speak up. I do think that the Brexit referendum was a fraud. And a fraud was perpetrated on people. We are living with the consequences now because there is no soft Brexit. There is only hard Brexit… It will be hard for people who’ve got the least capacity to withstand that, which is tragic.”
Despite now having lived in the US for four and a half years, Miliband admits he still feels “very much like an Englishman in New York, a legal alien, because it’s where I live but it’s not my city.” But there are things he’s learnt to love about the US, too: “The British are brilliant at irony, sarcasm – and there’s a straightforwardness and a sincerity in America that is refreshing.”
His life in New York involves doing the school run, going on long walks and the occasional family holiday in an RV campervan with his wife, Louise, a professional violinist, and their two adopted sons, Issac, 12, and Jacob, 10. Louise “has been an amazing partner and brought huge things to my life”, and he describes their relationship as “a great refuge”. Their first meeting reads like a
“I DO THINK THE REFERENDUM WAS A FRAUD”
romcom script: they met on a plane, across the aisle, when Miliband offered to place Louise’s violin in the overhead locker and she replied,
“No, thank you, I’ll do that myself.” (She wasn’t going to trust a stranger with anything so valuable.) Miliband grins as he recounts the story: “I remember I saw her smile first.” When we talk about how to sustain love in the long term, he says it’s about, “Respect. Pride in someone else’s achievements.” And the biggest thing? “Trying to match my empathy for her with her level for me. Her ability to put herself in my shoes is amazing, and so I try to see things from her vantage point. That’s the core of it.” As for being a dad, Miliband admits it has tested him in all sorts of ways. “Parenting is so hard, you don’t get any training for it! [You have to] try to see the world from someone else’s point of view, who is of a different generation and has a different set of pressures.” Ultimately, he’s learnt that it requires “patience, flexibility, innovation, entrepreneurialism, determination”. I suggest it almost sounds harder than politics. “It is! Being a good parent is the hardest thing. You are always a work in progress.”
It has also given him a new perspective on his work, through which he often meets child refugees who have suffered monstrous cruelty in their lives. Nevertheless, he stays positive, because “if you look at statistics, you get depressed; if you look at people, you’re hopeful”. Last year, the IRC helped 26 million people forced to flee from war or disaster to rebuild their lives, and in his book, Miliband passionately argues their case, pointing out that the refugee crisis “is not just about
‘them’; it is also about ‘us’”. Rescue also gives us a glimpse into who Miliband is at his core – a logical thinker who is both hard-headed and big-hearted. We learn about his love for his old constituency South Shields, the mistakes he’s made (on voting to support the Iraq war: “My assessment of the risks, and therefore my vote, was wrong”), the lessons he’s learnt, and the emotional scars he carries. On losing the Labour Party leadership race to his brother, he writes, “It is tough to think back to that period, because the campaign and its results were so negative, both short term and long term, both personally and politically.” I wonder, given that both he and his friend Hillary Clinton have experienced political heartache, what he felt after her election loss. “Terrible. There are no silver medals in politics. I thought she would be a good president and obviously the American people decided otherwise. She was an empathetic listener, she had real emotional intelligence and she understood what people were saying.” He thinks what we’re seeing across the world “is this grievance politics. It’s the same with Brexit; people know what they’re against, they don’t know what they’re for.” As for his own loss, seven and a half years ago now, what has it taught him about himself? A pause. “That there is no point in trying to press the replay button because it’s the same outcome. So what’s the point in going over it? The most important thing is not to live in the past. You have to learn from it – but there is no point living in it.”
When I ask if there’s anything he would do differently today, he flashes a half smile. “Of course.” Then laughs: “But that’s a whole other interview.” Perhaps the one in which he announces his return to UK politics? Only time will tell. e Rescue by David Miliband (Simon & Schuster, £8.99) is out now
“THERE ARE NO SILVER MEDALS IN POLITICS”