Published: 23 July 2026
Last updated: 16 October 2026
Last Monday, Andy Burnham “kissed hands” with King Charles and became the fourth prime minister in the king’s short reign – and the fourth prime minister in as many years. Burnham sees his task as the rebuilding of the UK after a decade of instability following Brexit – to provide “a circuit breaker” in the periodic replacement of British leaders. If promises are to be believed, Burnham’s ascendency means a decentralisation of power and an implicit rolling back of the trickle-down philosophy of Thatcherism.
Burnham appointed Ed Miliband as his Foreign Secretary – probably as a means of avoiding his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Miliband is Jewish and on the Left of the Labour Party. He is also the scion of a distinguished political family. He challenged his brother David for the Labour leadership in 2010 – and surprisingly defeated him with the help of the trade unions.
The subsequent bad blood between them after this event was also coloured by a perception that David was more interested in Israel than his brother. On his appointment on Monday, Ed Miliband released a statement which characterised himself more as a Jewish Briton than as a British Jew:
“My parents came to Britain as Jewish refugees from the Nazis. To them, Britain was both a sanctuary and a beacon of hope in the global fight against fascism. I will carry my parents’ faith in that spirit of Britain to my role representing our country.”
His father, Ralph Miliband, was a renowned socialist academic at the London School of Economics – and a member of the Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair in his youth before fleeing to the UK on the last boat out of Belgium in May 1940 in order to escape the Nazi advance.
