Red Ed’s jolly tangled love life
Miliband’s wife has told of her fury after meeting ‘unattached’ Ed at a dinner – only to learn he was secretly seeing the hostess. In fact, it was just one of a number of relationships he had with women from the same incestuous, privileged clique
RELISH the scene. A dinner party in West London. The hostess: Stephanie Flanders, the glamorous then economics editor of BBC2’s Newsnight. The guests: young barristers and would-be politicians.
Central to the party that night back in March 2004 was Flanders’ boyfriend, Labour rising star Ed Miliband. At the time, he was chief economics adviser to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown.
Miliband had been back in Britain for two months after a brief spell as a lecturer at harvard University in the U.S. Ever the policy nerd, the son of a Marxist professor waxed lyrical about economic theory.
As he held court, a young woman called Justine Thornton, who was sitting across the table and whom he had never met before, became transfixed.
A clever young environmental lawyer, she had been invited by Stephanie — the brilliant daughter of Michael Flanders, of the Fifties and Sixties musical comedy duo Flanders & Swann.
Yesterday, Justine recalled in a red-top newspaper: ‘ I thought he was goodlooking and clever and seemed to be unattached. But we just went down a conversation cul- de- sac. Apparently we had nothing in common.
‘he just wanted to talk about economics — one of my least favourite subjects. None of our conversations went anywhere.’
Mrs Miliband said that she was ‘furious’ when — far from being ‘unattached’ — she found out that he was ‘secretly going out with’ the woman who had invited her for dinner.
Fast-forward more than 11 years and the Milibands have since had two children, married and believe they are less than a month away from moving house with their family to No 10 Downing Street.
But the story of the pair’s first meeting offers a fascinating insight into the somewhat caddish character of the Labour Leader.
For, not only did he knife his elder brother in the back by ending his dream of getting the Labour leadership by standing against him (contrary to the wishes of their mother), but he met his future wife Justine (albeit unwittingly) at that dinner party hosted by his then girlfriend.
The story emerged yesterday when Mrs Miliband gave an interview to the Labour- supporting Daily Mirror. Clearly she was guided by Labour spin doctors, who wanted to give the impression to voters that her husband was a touchyfeely human being, rather than the soulless nerd that his awkward image conveys on TV. The simper- ing headline of the article ran: ‘Ed bandaged me up after I was bitten by a Doberman . . . and I fell in love.’
Justine told how, during the 2005 election campaign, Ed had come to her rescue after she was bitten by the dog.
It happened when they were putting leaflets through letterboxes in houses in Runcorn, Cheshire. ‘Ed bandaged me and I fell in love with him,’ said Justine.
After their first meeting at that 2004 dinner party, it was at least a year before they started dating. Justine’s recollection isn’t, though, the first public airing of her love story with Ed.
In the biography of the Labour leader, titled Ed: The Milibands And The Making Of A Labour Leader, an associate is quoted as saying: ‘Although she was struck by his eyes — wide and brown and fixed on their subject — a friend remembers her undoubted excitement after meeting Ed as: “Gosh, how fascinating, he’s really clever”, rather than: “Gosh, how handsome”.’ Perhaps glossing over what may be seen as such caddish behaviour, the Daily Mirror omitted to say that the dinner’s hostess, Stephanie Flanders (who later left the BBC for a £400,000-a-year job at a bank in the City), was Ed’s then girlfriend.
It was left to Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul to let the cat out of the bag after reading the Mirror story, when he tweeted: ‘Justine on clandestine Ed. Why has Mirror not named the host of that dinner? It was Stephanie Flanders.’
Considering that she, at the time, was economics editor of BBC-TV’s flagship Newsnight, Rentoul added: ‘ Could the secrecy have been because he was a Treasury special adviser and Stephanie Flanders was a BBC economics journalist?’
What’s more, there is another intriguing twist to this story of high politics and high economics.
For two years ago, Ed Miliband ungallantly blurted out, during an interview with a celebrity magazine, that not only had he romanced Stephanie but that his close Labour colleague and Shadow Chancellor,
Spin doctors want to portray Miliband as touchy-feely
Ed Balls, had had a relationship with her, too.
Miliband said: ‘We did both date her but there was a long time apart between me and Ed. Stephanie and I don’t have any problems running into each other now.’
For her part, Stephanie had no forewarning of Miliband’s revelation and restricted her response to curtly dismissing her relationship with him as having been ‘very brief and a very long time ago’.
However, her relationship with Balls, a decade earlier, was more serious. They met in 1989 at Harvard University, where they were both Kennedy scholars after having graduated from Oxford University.
It was while they were working at the Financial Times as leader writers that their friendship blossomed into a serious relationship.
The way these relationships intertwined also highlights the deeply incestuous and narrow world of the Labour high command. For it wasn’t just Miliband and Balls, but others, too, who had close personal relationships.
Of course, Balls is now married to fellow Shadow Cabinet Minister Yvette Cooper. All four studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University.
Cooper and Flanders were tutorial partners and Kennedy scholars at Harvard. Miliband also studied at Harvard.
Cooper once shared a house with Miliband (who apparently had a few other girlfriends). And she met Balls when they both worked at the FT.
But back to Ed Miliband’s tangled love-life. For several years in the mid1990s, when he was working as an adviser to the then-Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown, he went out with fellow political aide, Liz Lloyd (a Cambridge graduate).
She worked for a time for Tony Blair, who described her in his memoirs as ‘an English rose, intellectually able and blue stocking or red stocking according to the occasion’.
In the summer of 1995, she and Miliband went on holiday to the south of France. They stayed in the family home of one of Miliband’s first girlfriends, Juliet Soskice (the daughter of an LSE political economist and who went on to marry the now-dead tycoon Andrew Rosenfeld, who gave £1 million to the Labour Party).
At the time, Juliet was dating the Blairite journalist Phil Collins (who went on to write speeches for Blair). It was clearly a busman’s holiday, as much of the discussion among the group was about the national minimum wage which was a New Labour policy.
‘We discussed it like we were in a Fabian Society seminar,’ recalled Collins. ‘I remember being in the kitchen and listening to Ed having a conversation about it in real detail.’
Miliband’s relationship with Lloyd continued when Blair became PM. Her job at No 10 meant she sat next to her lover’s elder brother David Miliband, who was a key figure in the Downing Street policy unit.
After breaking up with Lloyd, Ed Miliband had a brief relationship with the journalist Alice Miles, who then worked for The Times. Ms Miles, who some years later became a single parent, also had a fling with her then coke-snorting Times colleague Tom Baldwin, who is now Miliband’s chief spin doctor.
What a deliciously small and privileged world! One that is a million miles from the lives of millions of ordinary voters. And so back to Red Ed and Justine. The next time they met after his questionable behaviour at his then girlfriend Stephanie Flanders’ dinner party was in the months leading up to him becoming an MP. Later, she helped campaign for him in Doncaster during the 2005 election by moving chairs around for a public meeting.
Some months after, Justine planned a holiday with a woman barrister friend, Quincy Whitaker, to Libya to see the Roman ruins. However, after it was booked, Justine said she wanted to go, instead, with Ed Miliband.
Their relationship had consolidated further by the time Miliband was appointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Brown government. Not only had their personal lives meshed, but their professional ones, too, as Justine (who was a member of the Labour Party) had written a book on the environment.
A few years later they had the first of their two children — and then decided to get married (in May 2011).
This week, by happily putting the spotlight on her husband’s past love affairs, Justine must be hoping that the result will be to portray him as a dashing romantic figure.
However, many voters — particularly women — may see him in a less attractive light.
Ed Balls was serious about the same girl Tony Blair called one of his exes ‘an English rose’