Heather Stewart

speaker

438 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Heather Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · Ed Stone to elder statesman: the making of Ed Miliband · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

And so that will have been a conscious decision.

Views differ within the Labour Party, right, on this uh very complex issue of the Middle East, just as they do across society.

I do think there was a chunk of the Labour Party that felt that

Kirstama was not tough enough on Israel, um, and didn't move quickly enough to condemn what was happening in Gaza.

And so I think there will be s some relief in parts of the Labour Party that this is a government that is willing to take a a a somewhat tougher line.

Well, I think he was always someone who had strong principles and was willing to stand up for them.

So if you remember um in twenty thirteen when there was that really difficult decision about whether the UK should join in with bombing Syria after Assad had to use chemical weapons on his population and Labour, led at the time by Ed Miliban decided not to support that and in the end it didn't go ahead.

And that was not an easy decision to make and a decision to make that again meant picking a fight with the US, Barack Obama, so on.

I do think over time you can see that he's kind of matured and found his voice as he's been on this sort of journey from losing political leader, you know, taking his party to sort of humiliating defeat at a general election, you know, to being ready to taking on this now.

Big role.

Yeah, so he's North London sort of through and through.

His parents were Jewish refugees.

Uh his father was a sort of noted Marxist intellectual.

So um he grew up with very clever people coming in and out of the house and you know, that sort of those sort sorts of discussions and dinner parties and so on.

But he started his political career quite young, um, as an advisor in Gordon Brown's Treasury in nineteen ninety seven when Labour came into power.

I think he was particularly involved in conceiving the idea of tax credits so that the government would sort of top up your income if you were on on low pay, even if you were in work.

But he was seen very much as a sort of a policy wonk, you know, into the spreadsheets and the detail of policy.

So David was the first Miliband brother to be Foreign Secretary in cabinet at the same time as Ed was Energy and Climate Change Secretary.

After Labour lost the general election in twenty ten.

There was a question about who would go on to lead the party.

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