𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Ed Miliband admitted he could lose his seat to Reform UK at the next general election. The Energy Secretary, who has represented Doncaster North since 2005, said Nigel Farage’s party is a “threat”.

Asked whether he worried about keeping his Red Wall seat, Mr Miliband told The Rest is Politics podcast: “Look, I think Reform are a threat, yeah. I think Reform are a threat across the country. I had this conversation in the pub last Friday night with this guy, and the conversation went like this – it went through the boats, the NHS and then it went to I think the deepest part of this which is he said ‘I feel that we have had governments of different parties, Labour and Tory, life is so hard for me, how can you answer that question?’.

“And I explained how we are trying to answer that question. He said ‘for me that is the test, I didn’t vote in 2024’. I think he voted Reform in the local elections.

“I wrote this book when I lost the election, called Go Big, and for me he epitomised the point of Go Big, which is he was saying ‘look, whether it is an ability to afford a house, make ends meet, the cost of living, public services, I feel like life is so hard and you guys aren’t addressing that’.”

It comes after an analysis of the local election results by Electoral Calculus suggested Mr Miliband was set to be ousted by the insurgent party at the next election.

Mr Miliband also hit back at Sir Tony Blair for adopting a “defeatist” attitude on tackling climate change.

The Labour former prime minister last month warned net zero was “doomed to fail” in a major report, saying that people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”.

But Mr Miliband said: “The report itself, he wrote a foreword to the report, is perfectly unobjectionable… but what is disappointing about Tony’s foreword, and I have huge respect for Tony, is I think it is incredibly defeatist which is not what Tony is. It is really defeatist.”

Mr Miliband has led the Government’s net zero drive, which Reform has railed against.