Labour leader will join David Cameron and foreign policy elite in Britain's equivalent of the White House 'situation room'
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Ed Miliband will be given a seat in the COBR room for today's meeting of the National Security Council. Photograph: Tony Kyriacou / Rex Features
A small piece of political history will be made today when Ed Miliband attends a meeting of the National Security Council.
Constitutional experts will no doubt be spluttering over the claret at this breach with convention.
Prime ministers regularly brief opposition leaders on sensitive matters of national security. But this is usually done in one-to-one meetings on privy council terms. The most high profile recent example of this was when Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, visited Tony Blair on a reasonably regular basis before, during and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Opposition leaders occasionally decline the briefings if they don't want to be tied to the prime minister. Relations between Blair and Charles Kennedy became frosty when the former Liberal Democrat leader opposed the Iraq war.
David Cameron thinks the old approach is out of date. So in opposition he pledged to establish a National Security Council (NSC) – effectively the cabinet's foreign affairs sub-committee – and said that the leader of the opposition would be invited on an occasional basis. Cameron said that there are some issues, such as Afghanistan, that are above party politics.
This means that this afternoon Miliband will be given a seat in COBR (Cabinet Office briefing room) for a full meeting of the National Security Council. By meeting in COBR, rather than the cabinet room in No 10, ministers can examine maps and hold video conferences with British diplomats abroad.
Miliband will be familiar with the room, which is Britain's modest version of the White House "situation room", from his time as a cabinet minister. In those days it was called Cobra which stands for Cabinet Office briefing room A.
Cameron will chair today's meeting which is also expected to be attended by Sir Peter Ricketts, the national security adviser, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, Liam Fox, Andrew Mitchell, the chief of the defence staff, Sir David Richards, and Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6. William Hague is in Luxembourg.
Miliband is allowed to hear all the state secrets because he is a member of the privy council from his time as a cabinet minister. Today's meeting is expected to discuss north Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Harriet Harman was the first opposition figure to attend the NSC last year. But she was acting Labour leader, which is why today's meeting will make a small piece of history.
Cameron hopes that the NSC will give a greater strategic direction to foreign policy. Britain's confused involvement in Afghanistan, in which the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development appeared not to co-operate, was the key factor in persuading Cameron to argue that Britain should establish an over-arching body to oversee foreign policy.
One of his first acts as prime minister was to poach Ricketts, the Foreign Office permanent secretary, to act as the first national security adviser who runs the NSC. This was designed to show that the NSC would carry more clout than a usual cabinet subcommittee.
Cameron's determination to give the NSC a broad strategic focus means that it does not act as a war cabinet. A Libyan subcommittee of the NSC is performing that role at the moment. It met this morning.
One challenge for the NSC is to find a replacement for Ricketts, who is due to take over as Britain's ambassador to Paris this summer. He is expected to be replaced by Kim Darroch, currently Britain's permanent representative to the EU. Cameron has been impressed by Darroch's deft handling of tricky EU summits since the election.