Ed Miliband — miliband with roots in the Russian Empire
Edward Samuel Miliband was born in London on 24 December 1969, the younger son of the political theorist Ralph Miliband and Marion Kozak; his elder brother is David Miliband. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's father.
Their paternal grandfather, Samuel Miliband (1895–1966), a leather worker, grew up in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, then in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire. He was a member of the Jewish Labour Bund by most accounts (the Polish Socialist Party in his son's recollection). A catalogue note at the Hull History Centre describes him as a former member of the Red Army; the writer Tariq Ali gives that service to one of his brothers instead. In 1922 he and his future wife, Renia, left Warsaw separately for Brussels, where they married the following year and where their son Adolphe, later Ralph, was born in 1924. In May 1940 Samuel and Ralph reached Britain on the last boat from Ostend, while Renia and their daughter remained in Belgium and survived the war in hiding.
Ralph Miliband became a political theorist at the London School of Economics and later at Leeds. In 1961 he married Marion Kozak, born in 1934 in Częstochowa, a city that had belonged to the Russian Empire until 1915; her parents' birthplaces are not recorded.
Ed Miliband was educated at Haverstock Comprehensive in north London, read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and took a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics; in 2003 he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard. He was elected Member of Parliament for Doncaster North in 2005. Under Gordon Brown he joined the Cabinet in 2007 as Minister for the Cabinet Office, serving alongside his brother, then Foreign Secretary, and from 2008 to 2010 was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
In 2010 he was elected Leader of the Labour Party, in a contest in which his brother was the other leading candidate, and led the party and the Opposition until 2015. He returned to the front bench in 2020 as shadow business and energy secretary, and after the 2024 general election became Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in Keir Starmer's government. On 20 July 2026 the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, appointed him Foreign Secretary; in his statement on appointment he recalled that his parents had come to Britain as Jewish refugees from the Nazis. Since 2017 he has co-hosted the podcast Reasons to be Cheerful.
Tracing the roots — Warsaw (Congress Poland, Russian Empire) — paternal grandfather Samuel Miliband
His paternal grandfather, Samuel Miliband (1895–1966), grew up in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire, and left for Brussels in 1922; his father, Ralph, born there in 1924, reached Britain with Samuel in 1940.
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Warsaw (Congress Poland, Russian Empire) — paternal grandfather Samuel Miliband. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"My family's history of migration and persecution is not separate from why I went into politics."