Britain’s blogging foreign minister

Last week, thanks to the good folks at the U.N. Foundation, I had the opportunity to meet David Miliband, Britain’s blogging new foreign minister and a young star of the Labour party. Miliband was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, where he gave a speech on Thursday that focused on the link between inequality and insecurity, and he met with me and a few other bloggers for a 25-minute Q&A session.

The British press, typically, has a love-hate relationship with Mr. Miliband, slamming him for being too young to be foreign minister (the baby-faced Miliband is just north of 42) or for hiding his charisma in order to make Prime Minister Gordon Brown look better. Andrew Grimson deploys the latter approach here for the Telegraph:

Ever since Mr Miliband was captured by Brownite agents and taken to King Charles Street, where he was locked in a gilded cage at the dreaded Foreign Office and exposed to the full force of the regime’s re-education programme, there had been fears he might crack under the strain.

In yesterday’s speech [at the Labour Party conference], there were clear signs of the intensive de-Blairification process through which Mr Miliband has passed. Like every other Cabinet minister, he was only allowed to speak for an insultingly short time, and was under strict orders not to outshine Comrade Brown in any way.

I found Miliband to be warm, smart, knowledgeable, and sincere—if not quite oozing the kind of “gravitas” that generally befits his position. As former cabinet minister Clare Short put it in a recent Seven Questions, “I don’t wish him any ill, but it’s ‘Harry Potter for foreign secretary’—a very, very clever boy, but there’s a sort of weightiness, a solidity that he just cannot have because of his age.” Miliband seems to understand this, positioning himself as a new kind of foreign secretary. Commenting on why he launched the blog, he said:

Foreign policy used to be about diplomats talking to diplomats. And now, it is about that, but it’s also about citizen-to-citizen, business-to-business contacts… Opening up the debate about foreign policy is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I asked him directly about the age issue, and he had this to say:

You can’t do anything about your age apart from wait. I think that in the end, you’ve got to be judged by what you say and what you do, and I think that most people are grown up enough to realize that. At least I hope so.