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and carbon foot prints and the like.

Just one look at his employment record will reveal that he has always been a professional politician. His first job was for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. From 1989-94 he worked as a Research Fellow and policy analyst at the Institute for Public Policy Research and from 1992-4 was Secretary of the Commission on Social Justice. In 1994 Milliband became Tony Blair's Head of Policy and was a major contributor to Labour's manifesto for the 1997 general election. After Labour's victory in that election, Blair made him the de facto Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit, a position which he held until the 2001 election.

After a year as a backbench MP he was appointed as Schools Minister, a junior minister in the Department for Education and Skills in June 2002. On 15 December 2004, in the reshuffle following the resignation of David Blunkett, he replaced Ruth Kelly as a Cabinet Office Minister. In 2005, he was promoted to the Cabinet as Minister of State for Communities and Local Government, a newly created cabinet post with responsibility for housing, planning, regeneration and local government. However Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, was officially in charge of these portfolios. Milliband was not given the title Secretary of State, although he was a full member of the Cabinet.

In other words he has never had to hack it in the real world nor rub shoulders with ordinary men and women who have ordinary jobs and ordinary lives.

Isolated in the Foreign Office he will be away from Westminster much of the time. If things go wrong and he finds Brown's militiamen briefing against him, it is much harder to defend oneself from Ulan Bator than it is from inside the Westminster Village. And, of course, there is the little matter of his former master, one Tony Blair, gadding about the Middle East trying to create that all-important legacy for himself as Middle East super-envoy, which will doubtless muddy the waters for Mr. Milliband. If he tries to coordinate matters with Blair, Brown will see that as disloyalty. If he runs counter to Blair, then our Foreign Policy is seen as weak and divided.

Before Brown was given a clear run at the leadership, no one else in the Labour party having either the support or the guts to run against him, it was being put about that the Tories were really fearful that Labour might ditch Brown and choose Milliband instead. The Tories allegedly feared Milliband as he was more telegenic, less hidebound by ideology, almost as young as David Cameron and the acceptable face of Blairism. Others, however, were less impressed, thinking his unctuousness and rather nannying manner a distinct vote loser.

One thing is for sure: Brown has handed him something of a poisoned chalice with the Labour's Iraq millstone firmly round his neck and the war in Afghanistan looking increasingly tricky. If he manages to avoid disaster in these areas, he may emerge unscathed from the experience. If not, yet another promising career will have been trashed.

Learn more about this author, Michael Huntsman.
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