Seumas Patrick Charles Milne (born 5 September 1958)Winchester College: A Register. Edited by P.S.W.K. McClure and R.P. Stevens, on behalf of the Wardens and Fellows of Winchester College. 7th edition, 2014. pp. 582 (Short Half 1971 list heading) & 588 (entry for Seamus Milne). Published by Winchester College, Hampshire. is a British journalist and political aide. He was appointed as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications in October 2015 under Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, initially on leave from The Guardian. In January 2017, he left The Guardian in order to work for the party full-time. He left the role upon Corbyn's departure as leader in April 2020.
Milne joined The Guardian in 1984. He was a columnist and associate editor there at the time of his Labour Party appointment, and according to Peter Popham writing for The Independent in 1997, was "on the far left of the Labour Party." Milne is the author of The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, a book about the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike which focuses on the role of MI5 and Special Branch in the dispute. n. 49, p. 968
Early life Born in Dover, Milne is the younger son of Alasdair Milne (1930–2013), Director-General of the BBC from 1982 to 1987, and his wife Sheila Kirsten, née Graucob, who was of Irish and Danish ancestry.
Education Milne was educated at Tormore School, a boys' independent preparatory school in Deal, Kent, followed by Winchester College, a public school in Hampshire. In 1974, he stood in a mock election at Winchester as a Maoist Party candidate.
Following Winchester, Milne attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, politics and economics, and Birkbeck, University of London, where he read Economics. While at Balliol, Milne was so committed to the Palestinian cause that he spoke with a Palestinian accent and called himself Shams (Arabic for "sun"). His sister Kirsty Milne, who died in July 2013, was an academic who had previously been a journalist.Iain Martin "Obituary: Kirsty Milne, journalist and academic", The Scotsman, 16 July 2013
After graduating from Oxford University, Milne became the business manager of Straight Left, a monthly publication that began in 1979, which, according to Standpoint magazine, was produced by a pro-Soviet faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and included several left-wing Labour MPs with pro-Soviet bloc sympathies on its editorial board. During his time at Straight Left Milne became friends with Andrew Murray, who much later again became a colleague of Milne in the Labour Party. Milne himself was not a Communist Party member.
Career
Journalism Milne worked as a staff journalist at The Economist from 1981 but was not content working for a free-market newspaper, later describing it as "the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy." In 1984, he joined The Guardian on the recommendation of Andrew Knight, The Economists then editor. Milne's early responsibilities for The Guardian included posts as news reporter, Labour Correspondent (by 1994), and Labour Editor. In 1994, Milne's colleague Richard Gott resigned from The Guardian following an article in The Spectator that alleged Gott had connections to the KGB and was a Soviet agent of influence—charges that Gott vociferously denied. Milne defended Gott against these allegations, which he thought "seemed absurd", and claimed the journalists who had written the expose of his friend were connected to MI5.The "seemed absurd" quote appears in
Milne was Comment Editor for six years from 2001 to 2007. According to Peter Wilby in an April 2016 New Statesman profile of Milne, his most controversial decision among The Guardian staff was to print a 2004 article by Osama bin Laden, assembled from recordings of one of his speeches. While almost all thought it should have been published, a small majority thought it should not have been run as a comment piece, although the Readers' Editor later defended this decision.
Milne's period in this role was described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine as having turned The Guardians comment section into a "truly global debating forum." Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan asserted that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of The Guardians comment pages ... making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain." Hannan also praised him as "a sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist". Following changes in staff responsibilities, he was succeeded as comment editor by Georgina Henry, with Toby Manhire as her deputy. Milne was moved to his role as associate editor in 2007, according to Peter Wilby because he was building up too many writers in his own image, and devoting too much space to Palestine.
Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia, and has also written for Le Monde diplomatique and the London Review of Books. He is reported to have lobbied within The Guardian in 2015 for editor-in-chief Katharine Viner to succeed Alan Rusbridger in the post.
Milne served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) for ten years, and is a former chairman of the joint Guardian–Observer NUJ chapter. In the 1980s, he chaired the Hammersmith Constituency Labour Party when Clive Soley (now Lord Soley) was the constituency's MP. Milne told a 2015 May Day rally in Glasgow: "Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement."
In October 2015, Kate Godfrey, who has worked as an aid worker in conflict zones such as Libya and Syria, described Milne as "an apologist for terror" in The Daily Telegraph, adding: "I think that he never met a truth he didn't dismiss as an orthodoxy and that nowhere in his far-Left polemic are actual people represented." The attacks on Milne struck James Kirkup in the same publication nearly a year later as being "a little silly, since part of the point of this columnising lark is to say things that get attention and provoke argument: by that measure, he was pretty good at the job."
Labour's Director of Communications In August 2015, Milne endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. In The Guardian, he wrote "the claim that the other leadership candidates – steeped as they are in the triangulating 'pro-business' politics of the 1990s – can offer a winning electoral alternative to Corbyn's commitment to what are in fact mostly mainstream public views, looks increasingly implausible. ... But for now the Corbyn movement offers the chance of a break with a disastrous austerity regime – and for a real democratic opening."
Appointment On 20 October 2015, it was announced that Milne had been appointed to the team around Corbyn, elected party leader the previous month, as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications. Reportedly on a one-year contract, he was originally "on leave" from his post at The Guardian and assumed his new role on 26 October. Milne's friend George Galloway tweeted "Just what the doctor ordered" in response to the news.Galloway has said that Milne is his "closest friend. We have spoken almost daily for 30 years". See In a soon-deleted tweet, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore expressed her dislike of "public school leftists" in reference to the news of Milne's new role and speculated that his appointment meant goodbye to Labour.
According to Tom Harris, a former Scottish Labour MP writing for The Daily Telegraph, Corbyn could have chosen for the Comms post "someone whose skills in media management were better known than his personal political views. Instead he chose Seumas Milne, a hate figure for the right of the Labour Party and pretty much everyone else to the right of that." Former Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson told the BBC that Corbyn had shown a lack of professionalism in appointing Milne, "whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he's completely unsuited to such a job, he has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in this country."
John Jewell, an academic at Cardiff School of Journalism, criticised the articles by Harris and others which mention Milne's response to the murder of Lee Rigby. Jewell observes that "the article in which Milne wrote of Rigby not being a victim of terrorism 'in the normal sense' began with these words: 'The videoed butchery of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks last May was a horrific act and his killers' murder conviction a foregone conclusion.'" See also
In October 2015, Patrick Wintour, the political editor of The Guardian, wrote that Corbyn "has been struggling to ensure he receives an effective press since he became party leader, and Milne will be charged with ensuring there is an improvement." In July 2016, Peter Preston, Milne's first Guardian editor, commented about the ethical challenges faced by journalists-turned-political advisers shortly after Milne's appointment: "The 'on leave' tag appears to make Seumas a once and continuing Guardian man, which won't help relations with journalists from elsewhere." According to Alex Spence, Milne has demonstrated a low opinion of much of the British press in his comments. Milne left The Guardians staff in January 2017, when it became known he was working permanently for Corbyn.
In a July 2016 Guardian column, Owen Jones defended Milne as "a deeply insightful and thoroughly decent man who has been wronged by his media portrayal as a soulless Stalinist apparatchik."
January 2016 shadow cabinet reshuffle In early October 2015, a few weeks before his appointment was announced, Milne was interviewed by the Russian government-funded RT television network while the Labour Party conference was in progress. He said that Corbyn's initial front bench constituted a "stabilisation shadow cabinet" and was of the opinion that current Labour MPs were "not only far to the right of most Labour party members, but actually it's to the right of public opinion." Milne commented that reselection in this parliament, necessitated by a reduction in the number of members of parliament due to planned constituency boundary changes, could be used for a "recalibration" of the parliamentary party.Milne expressed similar opinions earlier. See In response to Milne's comments on RT, Corbyn's spokesman said in October 2015 that the Labour leader "has been crystal clear he does not support changes to Labour's rules to make it easier to deselect sitting Labour MPs."
While the January 2016 reshuffle of Labour's frontbench was in progress, then-Labour MP Ian Austin said that Milne's actions had been "an absolute disgrace" over the previous few weeks. According to Austin, "people in the leader's office, I'm told by journalists, Seumas Milne, telling us that Hilary Benn was going to be sacked, that Michael Dugher was going to be sacked, a whole long list of people, not for questions of competence or loyalty but because they voted a different way on a free vote." Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator, cast doubt on this interpretation when speaking on This Week, giving credence to a view that it was other people who claim to be close to Corbyn who were briefing journalists. While Dugher was sacked by Corbyn from his post as Shadow Culture Secretary, Benn survived as Shadow Foreign Secretary.