𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Miliband’s accelerated rush towards a fanciful 2030 deadline meant throwing tens of billions at vast infrastructure schemes and unproven carbon capture tech, while pressing ahead with wind and solar before the grid is ready. Productive farmland and beautiful countryside are being scarred by oversized wind turbines, endless solar farms, pylons and battery storage plants, mostly stamped made in China. Oil city Aberdeen is being ravaged and the UK de-industrialised, and Burnham isn’t prepared to put up with it.

If Burnham handed Miliband the Treasury, he’d run off with it. The new PM would be handing the running of his government to its most ungovernable member from day one. Thankfully, it looks like Burnham has woken up to the threat.

The Treasury, financial markets, trade unions and just about everybody outside North London’s liberal bubble will breathe a sigh of relief. But it leaves Burnham with a problem. Miliband is hugely popular among Labour Party MPs and activists, and he won’t like being stabbed in the back. He’s usually the one doing the stabbing – remember what he did to his brother? And of course Keir Starmer. Now Miliband is the one being skewered. Some will see it as poetic justice.

New prime ministers like an early win, and canning Red Ed looks like one of the easiest available. But it could backfire. Labour’s 403 MPs are overwhelmingly on the left and in a constant state of mutiny. When the going gets tough for Burnham, as it inevitably will, Red Ed could become a rallying point.

Burnham has to watch his back. It seems he may try to fob off Miliband with another senior post, perhaps foreign secretary. Let’s hope that keeps him too busy for plotting and scheming. Although I dread to think what our foreign policy will look like.