Ed Miliband is the most popular cabinet minister among Labour Party members, according to a Survation poll for Labour List. The energy secretary topped the poll, and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, came second. Keir Starmer, the actual prime minister, came well down the league table, in 17th place out of 24.
Surveys of Labour members are rare. This is the first I know of since October 2023, so it lights up a hidden part of the political landscape like a flash of lightning. What it reveals is that party members are sentimental pragmatists. They love a loser. They admire politicians with supposedly left-wing principles, and they do not accept, at this stage, that Miliband’s net zero policies or Rayner’s employment rights law risk losing votes.
In my view, their ranking of cabinet ministers is almost the reverse of one that would be drawn up with a view to winning the next election. The ministers who are delivering the policies the voters want – Wes Streeting repairing the health service and Liz Kendall trying to restrain the increase in welfare spending – are near the bottom. Rachel Reeves, who has had to take some tough decisions to restore the public finances, is the most unpopular of all.
Yet the sentimentality of Labour members is balanced by a willingness in principle to do what is needed to win. Although Miliband is the most popular cabinet minister, party members rate him the worst, alongside Jeremy Corbyn, of recent leaders. Tony Blair is rated best, followed by John Smith, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer and Neil Kinnock.
The rehabilitation of Blair was a necessary condition of last year’s election win, but the high ranking for Smith is a classic of sentimental pragmatism: he wasn’t a loser, but by dying early, he allowed utopians to read whatever they liked into his right-wing Labour politics.
One of the most revealing questions in the survey, though, asked which party is Labour’s biggest electoral threat. The result was overwhelming: 71 per cent said Reform; only 16 per cent said the Conservatives. I think this is accurate, but if Reform is the main enemy, then that has consequences – especially for the grassroots’ darling in the cabinet.
The war against net zero is a big part of Nigel Farage’s campaign. Kemi Badenoch, whose own members might give a similar answer to a question about which party is their greatest threat, has abandoned the 2050 target date. Miliband denounced her vigorously, but with a hint of protesting too much, as if he was feeling the pressure.
He is used to it, of course, but the more that Morgan McSweeney, the architect of last year’s victory, thinks about the next election, the more important it will become to Starmer to get green politics right. He and McSweeney will not want to overdo anything that costs voters money.
Solar panels on school roofs are fine. They will pay for themselves over time. Electric cars are already cheaper to run and will soon cost less to buy than petrol ones. There may yet be plenty of wind turbines that can produce cheaper electricity than gas over their lifetimes, even accounting for connecting to the grid. But beyond that, the road to net zero starts to get expensive, and an energy secretary who simply asserts that green energy creates good jobs becomes an electoral liability.
I think, therefore, that Miliband will not be in his current post at the time of the next election; and I don’t think he wants another ministerial job, so he will be out of the cabinet. One well-informed No 10 source guesses that he will be out this year. Whether it is this year or later, I think Starmer will, with ruthless politeness, ask him to make way for new talent.
To be blunt, Starmer does not have to worry about what Labour members think. He thought that he was down, after losing the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, and he turned things round by a single-minded focus on “hero voters” – non-metropolitan, working-class, former Labour voters.
He thinks that he can do that again, and that if Miliband is an obstacle to winning, it won’t matter how much Starmer owes him for getting into parliament in the first place. The adulation of Labour members will not save him.
