COLUMNISTS 
I am 35,000ft above Afghanistan. Beneath me, in the snowy hills, an insurgency is raging. In front of me sits David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, who is leaning forward in his cream-coloured leather seat on a flight from Kabul to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”
At 42, Miliband is one of Britain’s youngest-ever foreign secretaries. As his musings on Amartya Sen [the Harvard academic and Nobel prize winner] suggest, he is also one of the most intellectual. The son of Ralph Miliband, a famous Marxist academic, he worked in a think-tank before serving as head of Tony Blair’s policy unit at 10 Downing Street. With the predictable British reaction to anybody who might seem a bit clever, Miliband’s colleagues in Downing Street nicknamed him “Brains”. He entered parliament in 2001 and rose swiftly. When Tony Blair was forced to step down as Labour leader and prime minister in 2007, despairing Blairites appealed to Miliband to run for the leadership against Gordon Brown. But Miliband resisted the temptation, and was rewarded with the job of foreign secretary when Brown formed a government.
A rise from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state in just six years demands real political skill. And a couple of days in Miliband’s company have convinced me that he is much more than a jumped-up intellectual. He has a politician’s knack for rarely saying the wrong thing – which makes him a tricky man to interview when there is a tape recorder running. He is also formidably energetic. His day began with an early morning visit to British troops in Kabul. It will end with a late-evening meeting in Dhaka, with politicians and businessmen. His schedule includes no “down time”. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, and his staff claim that they have to remind him to eat.
Miliband had been visiting Afghanistan in the company of Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and remarks wistfully that “Condi has her own 747 – two of them, in fact.” Britain’s foreign secretary has to make do with an eight-seater corporate jet, leased from a Pakistani company. Shortly before I sit down for lunch in the seat opposite him, a phone in the arm-rest next to Miliband rings loudly. The foreign secretary picks it up and says “hello, hello…” but cannot establish who is on the line. He hands the mysterious call to an aide. “Exciting,” he remarks vaguely.
When the hostess approaches to take our lunch order, Miliband asks for a sandwich. He is told that this is not possible. After a moment’s hesitation, he orders a Greek salad, some chicken and a glass of water. I go for a green salad and the chicken. The meal arrives swiftly. It is standard airline fare. Miliband eats quickly, without appearing to notice the food. The only moment of drama comes when he drops some feta cheese on his cuff. “Damn, damn, damn,” he says. This seems excessively emotional to me. But then, he will be greeted immediately by television crews and government ministers on the tarmac at Dhaka. A large oil stain on his shirt might look tacky.
Ever since Miliband was appointed foreign secretary, he has been teased about his youth. He is boyish-looking, slim and with only the slightest hint of grey hair. One British commentator has suggested that he looks like he is on work experience. Miliband has not helped matters by saying that he has to pinch himself every time he walks into the foreign secretary’s office – a remark that he repeats to me on the flight. But following him around it strikes me that the idea that he lacks authority is unfair. It helps that he is well over 6ft tall. He is also able to speak fluently and without notes on a range of topics.
I suspect he might have had to pinch himself a few times in Afghanistan, as he inspected the British troops there. His father, Ralph, who died in 1994, was a leading opponent of the Vietnam war and a loud critic of Nato, which is conducting the war in Afghanistan. “What,” I ask Miliband, “would your father have made of the Afghan war?” “He would have been less opposed to the Afghan war than to the Iraq war,” says Miliband carefully. “He bought into the idea of universal values. He wouldn’t have agreed that the Afghan people can’t cope with democracy. But I think he would have been suspicious of British and American intentions.” He smiles slightly, perhaps conscious that he himself is now the embodiment of British intentions.
Miliband also makes a clear distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. He is steadfast in arguing that the Afghan war was justified and must be won. But he is more circumspect about Iraq. I ask if Tony Blair had made the right choice in going to war in Iraq. Miliband replies: “He made the right choice, given what he knew at the time … Everybody thought there was WMD.” He adds swiftly that there is no point now in re-fighting the arguments of five years ago. The point is to deal with the situation as it unfolds over the next five years.
But the experience of Iraq has clearly left a mark on his thinking. I notice that he uses the word “neo-con” as a term of abuse, arguing that the struggle to create a democracy in Afghanistan is not a “neo-con” project, but involves the support of “deeply progressive values”.
It seems to me, however, that Miliband’s thinking and background have more in common with American neo-conservatism than even he might realise. Miliband’s father was a Jewish refugee, who escaped Belgium just before the Nazis got there. Many of the American neo-cons also had Jewish forebears who were European immigrants steeped in the thought of the far left – although they tended to be Trotskyites, rather than Marxists. Like the neo-cons, Miliband is a firm believer in universal values and in the idea of promoting democracy in the world – and he does not rule out military intervention as one of the options available. One of his tasks in Bangladesh will be to put pressure on the caretaker government to stick to its promise to restore democracy by the end of 2008.
In Afghanistan he spoke warmly of the country’s new democracy, of the provincial councils set up all over the country and of the need for “clean and efficient government”. I ask him whether the effort to set up a democracy in the world’s fourth-poorest country might not be a slightly quixotic venture. He is having none of it: “You can’t make a simple transplant of a democratic system. But … it’s not quixotic to think that people want to govern their own affairs.”
As the chicken is cleared away, and a fruit platter is carefully placed on the table between us, we move on to the general subject of democracy promotion abroad. Miliband is giving a speech on this subject in Oxford, two days after we get back from Bangladesh. An aide across the aisle is working on the address, as I talk to his boss. It is a very Miliband effort – quoting everyone from Victor Hugo to the inevitable Amartya Sen. It displays a fondness for fancy new ideas and concepts that may reflect Miliband’s past as a star student at Oxford and the MIT.
Miliband outlines some of his current theories to me. The modern age is characterised by the fact that people feel simultaneously more free and more insecure. Something called a “civilian surge” is taking place. This involves the rise of the “better-informed citizen … who is more able through technology to produce and distribute information, more able to hold power to account”. I glance down at the snowy mountains of Afghanistan miles beneath us and wonder what the Taliban would make of all this. I suspect it would be way over their heads.
I ask the foreign secretary why he feels the need to intellectualise foreign policy in this way. It is all about political persuasion, apparently. “You’ve got to try and tell a story to people,” he suggests, “and, in the end, stories are not about policies, they’re about ideas.” But isn’t this particular narrative a little too intellectual for the average British voter? For the first time in our conversation, Miliband looks faintly hurt. But after a moment’s pause, he acknowledges that this is perhaps a fair criticism.
Miliband’s fondness for theory shows that whatever the differences between the Marxism of Ralph Miliband and his own New Labour values, he is very much his father’s son. But listening to the foreign secretary speak, it strikes me that he is also very much the political son of Tony Blair. It is not just that they share many ideas. It is also that Miliband’s accent and mannerisms are distinctly reminiscent of his former boss. He has the same way of clipping the end off his sentences; the same mix of posh and proletarian pronunciation. When he tells me, “you gotta win hearts and minds,” the accent and intonation are pure Blair.
I ask Miliband how strongly he had been tempted to try to succeed his mentor by running for the Labour leadership. Sipping his coffee and ruminatively unwrapping a mini Twix bar, he says: “I thought about it, but I was never tempted to do it.” I am not sure I believe this, since Miliband had allowed many weeks of public speculation in the spring of 2007 before finally ruling himself out of the race. But he is emphatic. “You’ve got to follow your guts, and it just wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. I’m happy where I am.”
I do believe him on this last point. He seems both comfortable and enthusiastic in the role of foreign secretary.
The crew inform us that we will be landing in Bangladesh in an hour. Miliband glances anxiously at the red box containing his briefing papers, and it seems courteous to let him get on with it.
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist
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Onboard a Challenger-601 eight-seater jet
1 x Greek salad
1 x green salad
2 x baked chicken, baby carrots, potatoes
2 x sparkling water
2 x fruit platter
2 x coffee
2 x mini Twix
Total: free
