What Miliband means

The Miliband appointment shows that he’s one of the winners from the deputy leadership contest. If Benn had run an impressive campaign the job would have been his.

Miliband will be viewed as the cabinet’s senior Blairite but on the Middle East he has very different views than his patron. As The Guardian reports this morning, “he privately regards the intervention in Iraq as a great error.”

Crucially, during the Lebanon crisis he was a critic in cabinet of Blair’s refusal to call for a ceasefire. Indeed, as Jack Straw, has argued it was Blair’s almost total isolation on the Lebanon that accelerated his departure.  When the New Statesman asked Miliband if he had dissented from the policy, he didn’t deny it but confirmed it: “I felt very worried because, put it this way, I don’t think that Israel is safer and stronger now than it was two months ago.