ED MILIBAND took a star turn in Cambridge yesterday to support Labour candidate Daniel Zeichner.

But the endorsement from Labour’s leader has already been eclipsed after Mr Zeichner won big-bang backing from Professor Stephen Hawking.

The world famous physicist and Cambridge University professor is featured on the Labour candidate’s latest election leaflet.

Mr Zeichner is pictured radiating enthusiasm alongside his most famous supporter in a snap taken near Mr Hawking’s home at Newnham College.

“We’re really pleased and we hope that people will take note,” he told the Morning Star.

“I think he fully appreciates the huge investment that the last Labour government made in science and you can see that in a lot of the buildings and laboratories around Cambridge.

“And many other scientists understand the city needs a Labour government to get the kind of investment we need again.”

As well as leading the scientific revolution, Mr Hawking has also been a driving force for political change and champion of the Labour Party.

Photos show him marching alongside Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave against the Vietnam war in London in 1968.
He also reportedly declined a knighthood in the 1980s.

More recently, he labelled the invasion of Iraq a “war crime” in 2004 and backed an academic boycott of Israel in 2013.

The Theory of Everything, the Oscar-winning film about Mr Hawking’s extraordinary life, gives a nod to his radical politics when, in one of the final scenes, his wife Jane calls him a “liberal socialist.”

The blockbuster also lays bare Mr Hawking’s struggle with motor neurone disease, while one scene shows doctors saving his life during a bout of pneumonia in the 1980s.

And Mr Hawking’s admiration for the NHS is the best reason to vote Labour on May 7, according to Mr Zeichner’s leaflet.

He promises: “I’ll fight tooth and nail to protect our NHS that has saved Professor Hawking’s life on so many occasions, and that you and I rely on and love.”

Mr Miliband used his visit to Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge to pledge that Labour would invest £150 million more every year in cancer treatment.