“Did you ever get up in parliament when you felt awful? Like you were about to drop dead?” The opening few minutes of Ed Miliband’s weekly podcast, Reasons to be Cheerful, are always like this: a slap-bass theme tune reminiscent of Seinfeld’s, followed by the former Labour leader and his co-host, Geoff Lloyd, “lightly teasing” each other, in ways that rarely make the toes curl because Miliband doesn’t sound gauche.
In the latest episode, he told an anecdote about rushing around hospitals looking for steroids the night before an important PMQs, because he was losing his voice. “People would have said I was having a breakdown,” he noted, before adding, without rancour, “which I was.”
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