Few Labour MPs know Ed Miliband better than Jon Trickett. It was in 2005, shortly after Miliband was elected to parliament, that he told the Commons newcomer he would one day lead the party. “He found it a surprising thought, but so it proved,” Trickett recalls when I speak to him. The shadow cabinet member, whose Hemsworth constituency neighbours Miliband’s seat of Doncaster North, was taught by the Labour leader’s father Ralph Miliband while studying for an MA in political sociology at Leeds University. “I vaguely knew him and David when they were children,” he tells me.
Trickett went on to play a defining role in Miliband’s leadership campaign, providing the psephological analysis (the five million votes lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, just one million of which went to the Tories) that convinced him that a break with New Labour was not just a moral necessity but a political one. In 2011 he entered the shadow cabinet as shadow cabinet office minister and was later named shadow minister without portfolio and deputy party chair in the 2013 reshuffle.
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