David Miliband, the leadership and the red thread of Labour

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is often caricatured as an ardent "Blairite". But in his interview, which begins on page 20, he demonstrates that he is leading a post-Blair foreign policy. He has abandoned the counterproductive rhetoric of the "war on terror" and the "arc of extremism", which absurdly portrayed Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda in the same category. The man who opposed Tony Blair's staunch support for Israel during the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon adopts a more nuanced approach to the intractable Middle East conflict and agonises over the failure of a settlement on the creation of a Palestinian state. On Europe, he is integrationist and positive, while sweeping away the notion of Britain as a "bridge" between the US and the EU. He is engaged in a candid dialogue, for better or worse, with India and Pakistan, which has earned him much opprobrium in India. He has recently become embroiled in the issue of torture at Guantanamo Bay. Mr Miliband also says that Tony Blair dominated foreign affairs to such an extent that the Foreign Office lost confidence. It is a grievance this restlessly energetic Foreign Secretary has addressed.

So, it is a cruel irony that the main reason he is these days excluded from speculation about the Labour leadership is that he is perceived as being from the now-redundant "Blairite right" of the party, the only strand which was ever seriously mobilising against Gordon Brown last year. It is through this prism that the return of Peter Mandelson as Business Secretary last autumn was seen as having cancelled out the Miliband threat to the Brown premiership.

Yet this is unfair. In his interview, the Foreign Secretary uses a striking new phrase: the "red thread of Labour", which he says needs to run through all policies, foreign and domestic. "I passionately believe that you cannot solve the problems of the modern world, international or domestic, without progressive values," he says, adding that the economic crisis presents an "opportunity" for more progressive taxation, especially of the rich.

The New Statesman believes that, even though Mr Miliband was damaged last summer when he published a provocative article in the Guardian outlining his vision for Labour when Brown was at his most vulnerable and speculation about a coup at its most febrile, he is far from down and out. Certainly, the Blairite label, which acts as one - perhaps the main - barrier to his becoming leader should be removed.

Mr Miliband has become an oddly remote figure at the Foreign Office, and, with the exception of our interview, he seldom if ever comments on domestic matters. However, his admirers want him to comment more on domestic policy, perhaps even to give a major speech, rather than confine himself to foreign issues.

In our interview he is unequivocal in his support of Gordon Brown: "He was the right man last year and the right man this year and he will be the right man next year." And yet he is not trusted by many close to the PM, who speak of him with suspicion. Thus, apart from in interviews such as ours, one of New Labour's most capable talents has become a semi-detached member of the government. That is not to say he was sent "abroad" to be away from the domestic scene: he was given the Foreign Office job as a reward precisely for not taking up the Blairite call to run against Brown in 2007. It is a ridiculous situation, however, if this former head of the No 10 policy unit feels constrained to express his views on policy, especially during a time of national emergency.

Asked if his actions last summer amounted to a leadership challenge, he states categorically that they did not. Whatever the truth, his description of the context is interesting in itself: "People were very worried. We'd just lost a by-election, and the whole party wanted the government to pull together and pull through . . . people were very, very despairing. And I felt just to go away on holiday and hope it would just get better was wrong."

Where Miliband is less convincing is, conversely, in his denial that there is any other jostling for the future leadership of Labour taking place elsewhere within the cabinet. There is, and the contenders include Ed Balls, James Purnell and Harriet Harman. It is our view that it would be foolish to exclude David Miliband from that list, even if he publicly, and repeatedly, does so himself.

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