Ed Miliband’s first week running Britain’s diplomatic corps has gone about as well as his last stint running the country’s energy policy: badly, and largely of his own making.
Miliband was handed the Foreign Office by Prime Minister Andy Burnham on Monday, a consolation prize after he reportedly angled, and failed, to land the far bigger job of Chancellor. Instead, that role went to John Healey, while Miliband was shuffled into King Charles Street, apparently as a way of keeping a restless and ideologically inconvenient colleague quiet.
Quiet, however, is not how his arrival went. Within days, hundreds of Foreign Office staff walked out on strike, the first of three announced days of action, with further stoppages pencilled in for August and a full month of work-to-rule to follow.
The dispute centres on management’s refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies as it pushes through cuts of between 15 and 25 per cent to the department’s workforce over four years, part of a “strategic transformation” that, from the picket lines, looks rather more like a demolition job.
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, did not mince her words, accusing FCDO management of leaving staff “no choice” but to strike and of treating them with neither transparency nor respect. It is an inauspicious welcome for a minister who spent years in opposition insisting he stood with working people.
The irony will not be lost on critics of the wider Civil Service, either. Conservative figures, Sir Mel Stride among them, have pointed out that the size of Whitehall has swollen by more than a third since 2016, even as Labour makes it harder to trim the payroll by handing unions greater power to strike. Miliband inherits a department that is simultaneously too large for the Treasury’s taste and too angry for his own comfort, a contradiction he has done nothing yet to resolve.
Then there is the small matter of his relationship with Washington. As energy secretary, Miliband blocked new North Sea drilling licences and, back in 2016, described Donald Trump as a “racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper,” a description that has aged into a serious liability now that Trump occupies the Oval Office and Miliband is meant to be managing the special relationship. Reports from Wednesday suggest the White House is “deeply concerned” by his appointment, hardly the ringing endorsement a new Foreign Secretary would hope for on the eve of talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Just days into the job, Miliband has managed to alienate his own staff, unsettle the markets’ faith in Labour’s grip on the Civil Service, and reopen a feud with the most powerful man in Washington. If this is what a “strategic transformation” looks like, the Foreign Office, and the country, may be in for a rough few years.
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