The united denunciation of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband by the Indian political class after he aired his views on the “root causes” of the Mumbai attacks may have been slightly unusual for a visiting foreign dignitary, but this is not the first time the young Labour MP has courted controversy. He has been called plenty of other names as well, not all of them flattering. He has been accused of being everything from a “puppet” to Tony Blair to a Brutus-like figure who stabbed his long-time benefactor in the back to get into Gordon Brown’s good books.

Now 43, Miliband was the youngest Foreign Secretary that Britain had seen in three decades when he was given the post in 2007 in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. However, he has been most closely associated with former British premier Tony Brown, who recruited him as his Head of Policy in 1994 after being much impressed by the young man’s work at the Institute for Policy Research. He quickly became Blair’s blue-eyed-boy and enjoyed a rapid ascent in the political hierarchy. After the Labour victory in 1997, he was appointed the de facto head of the Policy Unit and served in that capacity until 2001, when he was elected to Parliament. Within a year, he was made a junior minister in the Department of Education and then Cabinet Office minister. He received his next major leg up after the Labour Party’s third consecutive victory in 2005, when he was inducted into the Cabinet.

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