Is there no humiliation too great for Ed Miliband?

It would be easy to think that no supposedly serious political figure of recent times has been more often and comprehensively humiliated than Sir Ed Davey.

The Lib Dem leader spent last year’s election campaign engaged in various cringe-making stunts. Last month he launched his party’s local election campaign by jumping up and down on a hobby horse.

But when it comes to humiliation, Sir Ed is a rank amateur compared to Ed Miliband.

The Lib Dem leader was merely finding ways to get coverage for his party. The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, on the other hand, has spent his entire time since taking office in July humiliating himself over policies and decisions which affect the entire country.

While Sir Ed’s humiliation is only at his own expense, Mr Miliband’s is at ours.

This week the Government announced it is to purchase 55,000 tons of coal from Japan to maintain production at Britain’s last remaining steelworks. Why do we need to buy coal from Japan?

Last September, the only remaining coal-fired power station closed, in what Mr Miliband triumphantly told the Commons in November was a “clear signal to industry, markets and the world that coal mining in the United Kingdom does not have a long-term future.”

He added that Britain would be “one of the first countries in the world to ban new coal mines” and that he was cancelling the licence for a new mine in Cumbria which the previous Conservative Government had approved – a mine which was intended to produce coal specifically for steelmaking.

But this is merely the latest in a never-ending series of humiliations for Mr Miliband – a series which began in opposition, when the £28 billion spending spree on green projects he had been trumpeting as the be all and end all of Labour’s plan for government was then reduced in the run up to the election by Rachel Reeves to £4.7 billion; she realised Miliband’s figure was simply bonkers.

Humiliation enough for most people to have resigned, surely. But not for Mr Miliband.

At the start of this year, the Government said it was in favour of a new third runway at Heathrow, as well as the expansion of Gatwick and Luton.

The last time Labour was in power, when he held the same post as now, Mr Miliband was widely reported as having threatened to resign from Gordon Brown’s cabinet if it supported a new Heathrow runway. And in 2018 he voted against a runway, saying: “We owe it to future generations not just to have good environmental principles but to act on them.”

So much for his principles; he still has not resigned.

On Monday Sir Keir Starmer announced that he is easing electric vehicle production targets to protect businesses from the impact of the new US tariffs. This means that full and plug-in hybrids can now be sold until 2035.

These are the same targets that Rishi Sunak moved from 2030 to 2035, and which Mr Miliband then said would be moved back to 2030. As he put it just last month: “I’ve just come back from China, I’ve just recently been in India, people are getting on with the transition, because people recognise this is the source of jobs in the future, the route to energy security”.

Now, humiliatingly, the rug has been pulled out from his feet by the Prime Minister. Mr Miliband has not resigned.

Or how about the proposed new Rosebank oil and gas field, which the Government is thought likely to approve. Mr Miliband has described the licence issued to Rosebank in 2023 (subsequently overturned by the High Court in Scotland) as “climate vandalism”.

Then there is the latest round of subsidies to the Drax power station, which burns wood pellets imported across the Atlantic from forests in Louisiana and Canada.

Such is the plant’s demand for wood that if it used home grown supplies it would get through the equivalent of a New Forest every two years. It is a green disaster and one of the country’s worst emitters of CO2.

On and on it goes – and that’s without mentioning the humiliation of the disastrous impact of his period as Labour leader.

He voted against military action in Syria and allowed Bashar al-Assad to carry on gassing his people. And he changed the rules for the election of a new Labour leader, letting anyone register to vote for a small fee, and handed over the party to Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Miliband is not merely a walking disaster – he is a disaster who appears to be incapable of understanding just how humiliating his time in office really is.