David Miliband

David Miliband

David Wright Miliband (born 15 July 1965) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Shields from 2001 to 2013, and was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010. He is the elder son of the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband. He and his brother, the Leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband, were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley, and Oliver Stanley in 1938.

Born in London, Miliband studied at Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he started his career at the Institute for Public Policy Research. At 29, Miliband became Tony Blair's Head of Policy whilst the Labour Party was in opposition and was a major contributor to Labour's manifesto for the 1997 election which brought the party to power in a landslide victory. Blair subsequently made him head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit from 1997 to 2001, following which Miliband was elected to Parliament for the seat of South Shields.

Miliband spent the next few years in various junior ministerial posts, including at the Department for Education and Skills, before joining the Cabinet as Environment Secretary. His tenure in this post saw climate change consolidated as a priority for policymakers. On the succession of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister in 2007, Miliband was promoted to become Foreign Secretary. At 41, he became the youngest person to hold that office since David Owen 30 years earlier. In September 2010, Miliband narrowly lost the Labour leadership election to his brother Ed. On 29 September 2010, he announced that to avoid "constant comparison" with his brother Ed, and because of the "perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where there is none, and splits where they don't exist, all to the detriment of the party's cause", he would not stand for the Shadow Cabinet.

On 15 April 2013, Miliband resigned from Parliament in order to take up a post as the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee in New York City, which triggered a by-election.