Analysis: Attacks on Ed Miliband in UK newspaper editorials have already exceeded 2024 levels

UK newspapers have already launched more editorials attacking Ed Miliband in the first four months of 2025 than they did during the whole of 2024, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.

In the year to date, predominantly right-leaning publications have published 65 editorials – articles seen as the newspaper’s formal “voice” – criticising the UK energy secretary, compared with only 61 across the full year of 2024.

Nearly four such editorials have been published every week so far in 2025, roughly three times the rate of the previous year.

This is a significant escalation from a period that had already seen an unprecedented torrent of attacks levelled at the energy secretary.

The articles, which primarily appear in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, frequently seek to label Miliband as a “net-zero zealot” with a “messianic” devotion to climate action.

The newspapers have focused specifically on Miliband’s support for renewables.

They have also tried to blame him for the potential closure of the UK’s remaining steel plant and – most recently – misrepresented the words of former prime minister Sir Tony Blair to falsely present them as a personal rebuke to Miliband.

Many of the articles urge prime minister Keir Starmer to “sack” Miliband due to his supposedly “radical” policy ideas, referring to him as a “liability” for the Labour government.

Despite this near-obsessive stream of criticism and constant speculation about the energy secretary’s job security, the prime minister has said unequivocally that the net-zero agenda is “in my government’s DNA” and that Miliband is “doing a great job”.

Record criticism

The UK’s Labour government won an election last summer, with a large majority, on the back of a manifesto that focused heavily on climate action.

As laid out at the time, one of the government’s “five missions” was to:

“Make Britain a clean-energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030.”

Miliband, the energy security and net-zero secretary, is the minister overseeing this brief and the public face of much of the government’s net-zero strategy.

This position has resulted in a relentless stream of criticism and personal attacks from right-leaning commentators and media organisations, against a backdrop of rising political and press opposition to net-zero.

Carbon Brief analysis in January revealed the scale of the personal attacks levelled at Miliband in newspaper editorials during 2024, both in the lead up to the general election and in the months that followed. 

However, the new analysis shows that the 61 critical editorials published last year have already been eclipsed in 2025 after barely four months of intense focus on Miliband. 

As of 2 May, predominantly right-leaning newspapers have already published 65 editorials taking aim at the energy secretary this year. The chart below, which shows the cumulative number of such editorials, highlights this rapid escalation.

Specific events, often only vaguely related to the energy secretary, have inflated the criticism of Miliband in the media. 

One example was the imminent closure of the UK’s last remaining steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, in early April. Right-leaning newspapers blamed Miliband, among other things, for “banning new coal mines” in the UK, which they argued could have provided coking coal to the facility.

(The Scunthorpe site’s owners prior to government control, British Steel, had said that the coal from a planned mine in Cumbria would not have been suitable for their needs.)

More recently, right-leaning newspapers have used the furore around a report published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) as a further opportunity to criticise Miliband. 

Many publications misleadingly interpreted comments by Blair as a criticism of the Starmer government’s net-zero policies and, by association, Miliband himself. They described the energy secretary as an “eco-loon” compared to the “uncontroversial” advice from Blair.

Miliband the ‘fanatic’

The majority of the criticism of Miliband in newspaper editorials in 2025 has come from the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.

The Sun remains the most consistent critic of Miliband, with 26 editorials published in 2025 so far. There have only been 18 weeks in 2025 to date. As the chart below shows, this spate of 26 editorials from the Sun is already approaching last year’s record of 29.

The attacks levelled at Miliband by right-leaning newspapers are often both highly personal and somewhat melodramatic.

They frequently imply that his focus on net-zero policies is a sign of mental instability or quasi-religious devotion, rather than being part of his job title – or acknowledging that reaching net-zero emissions is the only way scientists say climate change can be prevented from getting worse.

The Sun has referred to Miliband’s “uncontrolled fanaticism”. The Sun on Sunday has described the “madness of Ed Miliband’s green crusade” and called him the “fanatical prophet of net-zero”.

Another editorial from the Sun stated that “Miliband is so blinded by eco-ideology that he’s lost touch with reality”, referring to his “eco insanity”.

In an editorial lamenting the state of the UK’s oil-and-gas industry, which shed 10s of 1,000s of jobs under the previous Conservative government, the Daily Mail mentioned:

“Energy secretary Ed Miliband’s messianic desire to sacrifice a multi-billion pound industry on the altar of net-zero.”

The newspapers also suggest that Miliband is unwilling to listen to any criticism. “Miliband has shown himself unprepared to countenance any suggestion that his efforts to decarbonise the grid within five years might be reckless,” the Daily Telegraph claimed.

There have also been frequent calls from newspaper editorials for Starmer to sack the energy secretary. In an article titled “Miliband’s madness”, published at the end of April, the Daily Mail asked:

“Isn’t it time Sir Keir Starmer accepted his colleague’s ideological net-zero fervour is damaging the government – and sacked him?”

Beyond the editorial pages, there has also been a constant stream of comment pieces, many by climate sceptics, which often go even further in their attacks on the energy secretary. “Miliband belongs in a padded cell,” Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote at the start of May.

This has come amid much media speculation from commentators on both the left and right that Starmer is considering firing Miliband.

However, Starmer has not given any indication of doing this. 

On the contrary, at the recent energy security conference the UK government hosted in London, Starmer stated that he was fully committed to his government’s net-zero ambitions. “That is in the DNA of my government,” he stated in a widely covered speech.