Miliband’s repetition of anonymous Gaza ‘stories’ as fact is no small lapse. It’s the whole problem

Which means the foreign secretary did not need to take anyone's word for anything. The figures were available to him from his own department. He chose “stories” instead. The American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, put it bluntly: the Brits, he said, had lost it.

Because the people lobbying Miliband remain unnamed, none of what they told him can be verified. In a conflict that has produced more disinformation than any in living memory – hospital strikes that weren't, casualty figures revised, footage recycled from other wars – a senior minister repeating anonymous accounts as fact is not a small lapse. It is the whole problem.

The defence offered by those who supported the video was, predictably, identity: “but he's Jewish”. Being Jewish is not a licence to stoke rumours. One Jew's heritage does not sanctify another Jew's exposure to risk.

Israel is the pretext invoked before a great many attacks on British Jews, and we are days from the High Holy Days. We all remember what happened around the last ones.

At this time of year, the foreign secretary circulating claims of Israeli cruelty to children – claims his own government's data does not support –- is irresponsible at best.

Stranger still, upon his appointment in July, Miliband condemned Hamas and called himself a strong friend of Israel. He said there should be no tolerance for those who question the legitimacy of the Jewish state, and none for boycotts. So what happened?

The likeliest answer is, as always, political. Andy Burnham's reshuffle was widely read as an attempt to placate Labour's left, and Miliband was its most senior beneficiary. But there may be a second calculation: placating a section of voters agitated about Israel. Who, after all, is better placed to say extreme things about Israel and get away with it than a Jew?

If that is the strategy then it will fail. For that constituency Labour can never be radical enough. Not while the Greens and independent Gaza candidates are prepared to go much further.

And it is worth asking why Miliband is on that front bench at all. In 2013 he tabled the amendment that sank the government's motion on Syria after the Ghouta chemical attack. It was a pivotal moment that signalled Western reluctance to enforce the “red line” on chemical weapons and emboldened Assad.

As leader he introduced the reforms that let anyone join Labour for three pounds, the change that delivered Corbyn. He spent the next five years on the back benches, saying little as the party he had led descended into the antisemitism the equalities watchdog would later find unlawful. In June 2019 he tweeted his best wishes to Lisa Forbes, days after she had been caught endorsing posts about Theresa May's “Zionist slave masters”.

Then there is everything else. The bacon sandwich that made him a national joke in 2014. The “EdStone” a year later – eight and a half feet of limestone bearing six unbreakable promises and his own signature. The Guardian said it “raised the stupidity bar” higher, and Boris Johnson called it a “weird commie slab”. One Labour press officer reportedly stood screaming at the television as the unveiling aired live. Labour lost the election two days later. They destroyed the stone, and were then fined for failing to declare its cost.

That is the man now representing Britain to the world. Ed Miliband has become a conduit for his party's fixation on Israel, deployed in the hope of winning back a handful of votes it was never going to win. A Jew best remembered for eating a bacon sandwich. It's just not kosher.