PUBLISHED: 01:53, 29 June 2024 | UPDATED: 08:28, 29 June 2024
One of them is expected to hold one of the four great offices of state if Labour wins the election and the other has long been one of Sir Keir Starmer's closest friends in politics.
So the marked absence of David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Ed Miliband, the climate change spokesman, from public view during the six-week election campaign is a curious matter indeed.
The apparent disappearance of Lammy is most perplexing, for in only a matter of days he is in line to move into a third-floor suite overlooking St James's Park in the Foreign Office, one of the mightiest repositories of power in the Whitehall estate.
He would be only the second black MP to ascend the marble-pillared Grand Staircase as Foreign Secretary (after James Cleverly), surely a feather in Labour's virtue-signalling cap.
His probable elevation is all the more significant at a time when we are experiencing the greatest unrest in global affairs since the end of the Cold War, thanks to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ever-more aggressive posturing on the world stage by China and Iran.
So where is he? And where is Ed Miliband? The man who led Labour to a humiliating loss in the 2015 election has reinvented himself as a green energy guru and is the architect of the party's controversial, and expensive, plan to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030.
I'm told both have been ruthlessly sidelined by Starmer's backroom staff, who decide who does the daily media rounds and who does not.
'They seem to have been banished from the airwaves,' says one Labour source. Another compared them to submarines: 'They have been ordered to stay out of sight and will not be allowed to resurface in public until the election is well and truly won.'
In Lammy's case, it seems his extraordinary propensity for public gaffes is to blame.
Just weeks ago, he waded into a diplomatic row by appearing to endorse a bid to prosecute Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged 'war crimes'.
Lammy, to the horror of seasoned diplomats in the Foreign Office, declared 'international law must be upheld' after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) called for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
The putative Foreign Secretary stoked more controversy the next day with a speech at the Chatham House think tank in which he resolutely declared Labour will recognise Palestine as a state if they form the next government.
Formal recognition of Palestinian statehood last month by governments in Ireland, Norway and Spain prompted Israel to withdraw its ambassadors, saying they were not willing to do business with countries which rewarded Hamas killers for the 'the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust'.
And what if Donald Trump wins the next presidential election?
In an article for Time magazine in 2018, Lammy branded Trump, who was then President, a 'woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath' and a 'profound threat to the international order'. The result of all this has been a genuine fear among Labour staffers that the outspoken former lawyer could trigger a diplomatic row during the election campaign with a careless word or phrase.
It's why they have confined him to tours of marginal constituencies across the country.
Then there is Brexit, the issue Starmer has been so desperate to avoid during the campaign — for good reason. He was, after all, the architect of Labour's second-referendum policy.
Yet Lammy was even more fanatical. He insulted Leave voters and tried to frustrate Brexit at every turn. In fact, his attempt to overturn Brexit began just three days after the referendum itself — when even the most ardent Europhiles were willing to accept the will of the people.
Not Lammy. He was determined to try to obstruct the largest democratic mandate in British electoral history.
He wrote in The Guardian (where else?) that the vote was 'advisory and non-binding' and that, 'at the very least', people should be asked to vote again.
In 2019, he compared the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Tory MPs to Nazis and white supremacists.
When he was challenged to withdraw the remarks he doubled down, saying the comparison 'was not strong enough'.
H e also said that people who backed Brexit had been manipulated by Putin's Russia: 'We don't want to talk about that, we don't want to admit that the Russians have been manipulating our elections, but that's partly what's happening.'
One Labour Party source tells me that Lammy was at the State banquet for the Japanese Emperor Naruhito at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday. 'But it wasn't a speaking engagement,' they were quick to add. 'He's been gagged because of his remarks on Gaza, the US and Brexit. They don't want him alienating potential Labour converts.'
Not surprisingly there is now growing speculation that Lammy will be overlooked for the plum post of Foreign Secretary in Starmer's first Cabinet reshuffle.
As recently as Wednesday, Starmer refused to guarantee Lammy would be made Foreign Secretary if Labour wins, amid rumours that Douglas Alexander — who served in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's cabinets — might be parachuted into the role.
But a source close to Lammy says: 'David assumes he will be Foreign Secretary. He doesn't mind keeping his head down now. He will have plenty of time to flex his muscles when he's Foreign Secretary.'
Perish the thought.
And what of Miliband? Despite his much-vaunted appointment to the new position of Shadow Secretary of State of Climate Change and Net Zero in 2021, there has been deafening silence from Miliband on the airwaves.
Given the close bond between the former Labour leader and Starmer, this must hurt. They are practically neighbours in North London and share a metropolitan vision of the world.
Both see implementing their green ideology as more important than jobs, security and sustaining the economy. 'They are friends, not just colleagues,' observes one Labour figure.
And, as a former leader who knows he won't get a another chance at the top job, Miliband is one of the few frontbenchers Starmer can trust not to start going on manoeuvres with an eye on the party leadership if and when disillusionment with the Labour leader sets in.
Even so, Miliband has been ordered to stay submerged. In part, thanks to his unhappy legacy as a failed Labour leader — but also because the public seem increasingly sceptical of 'climate change' policies.
Indeed, Labour's own private polling shows there is widespread unease over the party's green crusade. Only weeks ago Miliband was humiliated when Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves vetoed his plan to spend a staggering £28 billion a year on green projects.
Just months earlier he had said: 'Some people don't want Britain to borrow to invest in the green economy. They want us to back down... I will never let that happen.'
Little did he know then that he would be blocked by elements within his own party.
Labour suffered further embarrassment on Thursday when leaked audio emerged of Darren Jones, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, admitting the true cost to the taxpayer of the dash to Net Zero and decarbonising the economy would be 'hundreds of billions of pounds'.
Miliband was not wheeled out to deny or try to defend the figure.
Perhaps that is because his record on the issue is far from spotless. It was Miliband who, as Climate Change Secretary in Gordon Brown's government, began the process of saddling householders with expensive green levies on their quarterly energy bills.
In government, he is hoping to mastermind a massive expansion in controversial and unsightly onshore wind farms, which despoil the landscape and upset local communities.
Miliband is also the champion of the ban on new licences for oil and gas drilling projects in the North Sea on environmental grounds.
The move has been attacked by the Tories and the SNP in Scotland, where Labour are hoping for major gains, on the grounds it will cost jobs and inflate household energy bills.
No wonder all-powerful campaign director Morgan McSweeney is dubious of Miliband and reportedly associates him with the days when Labour was unelectable.
One Labour grandee says: 'Morgan doesn't want him talking about expensive new green initiatives, so he's been sidelined. He's a reminder of the past while Starmer is trying to look forward.
'Miliband will definitely still be in the same job after the general election. But there must be a chance that Lammy will not — there are plenty of people willing to take his place.'
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