Ed Miliband: The former Labour leader with a big role in Sir Keir Starmer's top team

Ed Miliband has been given the energy security and net zero brief by Sir Keir Starmer.

Miliband, former leader of the Labour party, ran for prime minister in 2015 and is considered passionate about climate, having pushed the climate agenda in Sir Keir's shadow cabinet.

Though he was forced to retreat over the party's £28bn investment promise.

Miliband brothers born into political family

Ed Miliband and his older brother David were born and brought up in north London by Jewish, Polish immigrants Ralph Miliband, a leading Marxist thinker, and Marion Kozak, an academic.

They had very similar educations, attending the same state secondary school before studying politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University.

Both Milibands joined the Labour Party and got jobs there in the early 1990s - the younger starting out as a researcher for Harriet Harman, the elder becoming Sir Tony Blair's head of policy.

Following Sir Tony's landslide election win in 1997 Ed was appointed as a special adviser to then chancellor Gordon Brown, where his economic abilities saw him develop a reputation as a "maths geek".

He took a year out from the Treasury in 2002 to be a visiting scholar at Harvard University, where he is reported to have mixed with Senator John Kerry.

On his return he was selected to run in the safe Labour seat of Doncaster North, following Kevin Hughes' diagnosis with motor neurone disease.

He was elected to parliament in 2005 with a majority of over 12,000 votes.

Close confidante of Gordon Brown

When the Labour leadership was passed from Sir Tony to Gordon Brown in 2007, Mr Brown brought in his former adviser as a Cabinet Office minister and then energy and climate change secretary.

During this time, he oversaw the passing of the Climate Change Act, which created statutory obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050.

After Labour's 2010 election defeat to Lord Cameron's Conservatives, Mr Brown's resignation triggered a Labour leadership contest.

Mr Miliband took on his brother, who had served as foreign secretary under Mr Brown, and Ed Balls, the children, schools and families secretary in the Brown government, in the fight for the top job.

He narrowly defeated his brother, who later announced he wouldn't serve with him in the shadow cabinet to avoid "constant comparison" between them.

David resigned from parliament in 2013, moving to the US where he runs an international aid charity.

Labour leadership

After becoming Labour leader, and as a member of the party's 'soft left', Mr Miliband distanced himself from many aspects of New Labour policy under Tony Blair, particularly over the Iraq War.

As leader of the Opposition, he was a staunch critic of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government's austerity measures.

But his views on the economy eventually made him unpopular with businesses, which during the 2015 election campaign saw 100 firms sign a joint letter claiming a potential Miliband-led government would "threaten jobs and deter investment".

A year before the election was called, the Labour leader's public image started to take multiple hits.

First in May 2014, the now-infamous photo of him eating a bacon sandwich was taken, which saw him widely mocked as "awkward" and "weird" in the press and on social media.

A few months later at the Labour Party conference in Manchester, he forgot part of his speech, choosing to improvise instead, and crucially missing out everything on the economic deficit.

After the election was called in May 2015, Labour's decision to erect a stone slab with its policies emblazoned on it in a Hastings car park - dubbed the "Edstone" - garnered further negative publicity.

Critics also used his decision to run against his brother for the Labour leadership against him, accusing him of "stabbing him in the back", which they claimed meant he would do the same to the country.

Having performed poorly in the European Parliament elections in 2014, Labour lost 26 seats at the 2015 election as the Tories won a narrow majority.

Mr Miliband resigned as Labour leader and was replaced in the interim by Harriet Harman and later permanently by Jeremy Corbyn.

Return to frontbenches

After several years on the backbenches, the former Labour leader returned to the shadow cabinet during the coronavirus pandemic - first as a shadow business secretary and then as shadow climate change secretary, a role he still occupies.

In a 2021 interview he said he was "still recovering" from his time as Labour leader, describing the final years as "quite traumatic".

Later that year, however, he stepped in for Sir Keir at Prime Minister's Questions while he isolated with COVID, to largely positive reviews.

During his time away from frontline politics, he launched a podcast with presenter Geoff Lloyd called Reasons To Be Cheerful about how to make positive change in society, and published a book entitled Go Big - How To Fix Our World.

He married his wife Justine Thornton, a barrister, in 2011, with whom he has two sons, Sam and Daniel.