David Miliband

David Wright Miliband (born 15 July 1965) is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the International Rescue Committee and a former British Labour Party politician. He was the Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010 and the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Shields in North East England from 2001 to 2013. He and his brother, Ed, were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley and Oliver Stanley in 1938. He was a candidate for Labour Party leadership in 2010, following the departure of Gordon Brown, but was defeated by his brother and subsequently left politics.

Miliband started his career at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Aged 29, he became Tony Blair's Head of Policy while the Labour Party was in opposition, and he was a contributor to Labour's manifesto for the 1997 election, which brought the party to power. Blair subsequently made him head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit from 1997 to 2001, at which point 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 in 2006 as Environment Secretary. His tenure in this post saw climate change consolidated as a priority for policymakers and on the succession of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister in 2007, Miliband was promoted to become Foreign Secretary. At the age of 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, 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 the posts of President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee in New York City, which triggered a by-election in South Shields.

Born in London, Miliband is the elder son of immigrant parents, Belgian-born Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband and Polish-born Marion Kozak, both from Polish Jewish families. The latter was a teacher before she became a homemaker. He was given the middle name of "Wright" after the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, a friend of his father. He has said "I am the child of Jewish immigrants and that is a very important part of my identity." Both his Polish Jewish paternal grandparents lived in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw. His paternal grandfather, Samuel, a trained leather worker, served in the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921 before moving to Belgium. His paternal grandmother, Renia (later known as Renée), also moved to Belgium, where she first met Sam, and the couple married in 1923. The German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 split the Miliband family in half: Ralph and father Samuel fled to England, while Ralph's mother Renée and baby sister Nan stayed behind for the duration of the war. They were not reunited until 1950. His mother, a human rights campaigner and early CND member, survived the Holocaust thanks to being protected by Catholic Poles but her father, David's maternal grandfather did not. During his visit to Poland in June 2009, Miliband went to his family tomb in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. He said of Poland, "My mother was born here, her life was saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression", and that he is "one of the million Britons who have Polish blood".

Miliband was educated at Primrose Hill Primary School, in Camden, and Newlaithes Primary School, in Leeds. In September 1976, he passed the entrance examination to the newly independent, fee-paying Bradford Grammar School and from 1978 to 1983, attended Haverstock Comprehensive School in north London. He obtained four A-levels (grades BBBD), and won admission to the University of Oxford. He was an undergraduate student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and obtained a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). From 1988 to 1989, he received a master's degree in Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Kennedy Scholar.

Miliband's first job was as a political analyst at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). From 1989 to 1994, he worked as a Research Fellow and policy analyst at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He was appointed Secretary of the IPPR's Commission on Social Justice upon its foundation in 1992 by the then leader of the Labour Party, John Smith.

In 1994 Miliband became Tony Blair's Head of Policy and was a contributor to Labour's manifesto for the 1997 general election. Following 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. He was given the nickname "Brains" by Alastair Campbell, after the Thunderbirds character.