It has to go down as one of the strangest public encounters between a senior British politician and, well, a nobody who is apparently big on social media. Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, was stopped in the street in New York by an influencer, Feroz Khan, in a brief and seemingly spontaneous interaction – one that just happened to be filmed and then posted all over social media. Miliband was there for the UN general assembly but apparently more than happy to chew the fat with a perfect stranger.
Khan’s shtick on social media is to conduct impromptu interviews with people he stops in the street with fawning remarks and soft-ball questions. ‘Excuse me, you have an amazing outfit,’ Khan coos as Miliband passes by (please pass the sick bucket). ‘What do you do for a living?’
Miliband’s reply is classic Ed, self-aggrandising and without an iota of self-awareness
Now that’s actually quite a good question that many voters up and down the country frequently ask of Miliband, without getting anything close to a satisfactory answer. What happens next gives the game away about this seemingly impromptu encounter. Surely the natural response of senior politicians (usually accompanied by a caravan of minders and flunkies) is to walk on but Miliband chooses to stop and face the camera. What follows is cringeworthy, to put it mildly. Judge for yourself (if you can bear to watch).
‘Hang on, you’re that Feroz guy, aren’t you?’ Miliband says. ‘You interviewed JLo once. What are you doing here?’ Really? Is anyone convinced by this? Has Miliband really got nothing more important on his mind in the midst of a busy UN gathering?
It becomes ever more surreal. Khan asks Miliband what he does for a day job, to which Ed replies that he is the foreign secretary of Great Britain (Well, no: it might be an idea for someone to tell Miliband that he is foreign secretary of the United Kingdom). No matter. His interrogator apparently knows even less about the job than his interviewee.
‘Please forgive me, I don’t know what that is,’ Khan replies. What could be more desperate, tragic even, than Miliband seeking validation of sorts from a man who doesn’t even know who he is.
Yet Miliband’s actual reply is classic Ed, self-aggrandising and without an iota of self-awareness. ‘I’m like the Marco Rubio of Great Britain,’ he declares. It is hard to imagine Rubio describing himself to anyone as the Ed Miliband of the United States but let that pass. The interview (if softball fawning questions can be described as such) then continues its inevitable descent into a propaganda black hole, with Khan asking: ‘What makes your work so special?’ ‘I’m trying to make the world a better place,’ Miliband replies. ‘And that’s important to me.’ There are many journalistic follow-ups to this tosh but none are forthcoming.
How did Miliband want to be remembered, asks our intrepid influencer. ‘As someone who tried to do good in the world. And someone who is kind.’ The mind boggles. Kind? Miliband? The man who double-crossed his brother and was one of the first ministers to tell his ‘friend’ Sir Keir Starmer that his time was up in Downing Street.
This video is sheer unadulterated political propaganda, promulgated all over social media without anything in the line of hard questions or scepticism. It should come as no surprise that Khan posted it on his Instagram in direct ‘collaboration’ with the Foreign Office and Britain’s UN mission, meaning it went up on their Instagram accounts simultaneously.
The Foreign Office spin doctors might be tempted to think that hundreds of thousands of views online suggest it is a case of cheers all round and a job well done. I am not so sure. Miliband is the foreign secretary – a great office of state – and should not have to resort to such pathetic stunts for a little positive publicity. Far too many ministers in this government, taking their lead from Prime Minister Andy Burnham, are falling over themselves to take part in infantile social media stunts. It is insulting to voters who want serious policy answers to the country’s problems, not government by TikTok and Instagram. Miliband may be the foreign secretary but he is also a narcissist and a fool – as this video all too clearly shows.
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