David Miliband is a British Labour Party politician who was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010 and the Member of Parliament for South Shields from 2001 to 2013. Born in London, he studied at Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after which he started his career at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Aged 29 he became Tony Blair’s Head of Policy whilst the Labour Party was in opposition, and he was a major contributor to Labour’s manifesto for the 1997 General Election, which brought the party to power.
Blair subsequently made David head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit from 1997 to 2001, at which point he was elected to Parliament for the seat of South Shields, and 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.
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, David narrowly lost the Labour leadership election to his brother Ed. He subsequently announced that, to avoid “constant comparison” with his brother, he would not stand for the Shadow Cabinet.
In April 2013, David resigned from Parliament to take the posts of President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, based in New York City, an organisation which oversees aid and development programs in 40 countries, a global staff of 12,000 and a budget of $450 million. David’s approachable and informative approach to after-dinner and keynote speeches as a political speaker can be tailored to clients’ needs, ensuring the audience comes away enthused, inspired and motivated.
