Newsmaker: David Miliband

LONDON, England (CNN) -- While all eyes were on Gordon Brown at his first Labour Party conference this week as Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary David Miliband threatened to steal the limelight.

Miliband dominated headlines all week, from his prediction that Labour had ten more years in power, to urging the Myanmar authorities to use restraint in dealing with demonstrators, then hinting that Britain's involvement in Iraq had been a mistake that alienated Muslims worldwide.

The second part of the week saw him flying to New York for his "debut" as Foreign Secretary at the U.N. Security Council and meeting with Angelina Jolie to talk about humanitarian issues.

So who is David Miliband and how did he rise to become the second youngest Foreign Secretary at the age of 42?

CNN European correspondent Robin Oakley explains:

David Miliband resisted the urging of Tony Blair loyalists to run against Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership, and thus the keys to Number Ten. His reward for sparing his party and Britain's new Prime Minister a top level contest was to be appointed as Britain's Foreign Secretary at the tender age of 42.

The question is how far he will go after that. He was tagged as a "future Prime Minister" too early for his own good and now needs a few years of solid political achievement to consolidate.

That and plenty of exposure on a world stage, which has so far seen him only as little more than a spear-carrier. Few doubt Miliband's intellectual capacity. The son of a Marxist sociologist, he made his name as a cool think-tanker rather than as a political firebrand.

He was one of Blair's top policy wonks for years, much respected by the previous occupant of Downing Street's most coveted address and nicknamed "Brains" by former Press Secretary Alastair Campbell. Nor is Miliband without charm. If the art of diplomacy is still "telling somebody to go to hell while making them feel they will enjoy the journey" he should manage well enough.

He makes remarkably few enemies and he managed better than most Blair staffers in simultaneously maintaining good relations with Gordon Brown. But he is not a natural back-slapper nor, as yet, a particularly commanding platform speaker. The range is there, the grasp of ideas, but the body language in his first party conference appearance in the new role was a little gawky.

An instinctive if earnest modernizer and somebody who prefers persuasion to confrontation, he was the first Labour minister to write his own blog.

He was always keener on social justice issues than Tony Blair and as the Foreign Secretary of a government keen to detach itself from the Iraqi quagmire into which it was led by Blair he has the advantage that he was known to have been privately skeptical about the war. In his first public words after his appointment he promised a diplomacy which listened as well as led.

Significantly, after Brown had devoted just one sentence to Iraq in his conference speech, Miliband in his declared: "While we've won the wars it has been harder to win the peace. The lesson is that while there are military victories there is never a military solution."

He told delegates of the young Muslims he had met in Pakistan who believed the West was "seeking not to empower them but to dominate them."

Good intentions, he emphasized, were not enough. He became a little too schoolboy yarnish, however, when he declared that it was "brilliant" to see Aung San Suu Kyi alive and well outside her house amid the demonstrations in Myanmar.

So far as Foreign Secretary he has done nothing unexpected. The firm words have been there on Myanmar and on Kosovo. Over the Litvinenko case he showed himself ready to expel Soviet diplomats.

He has been a strong advocate of Turkish entry into the EU. But he has not yet been seriously tested in crisis or confrontation. Developing authority in such a position at such an age will take time.

But nobody is yet suggesting that David Miliband won't make it. E-mail to a friend