Miliband vs. The Mail: what's the back-story?

Do you remember the disgusting reaction of the Left to Maggie Thatcher’s death? The vile t-shirts, the ’dance on her grave’ slogans? The celebrations by Trade Union fatcats?

 

And did we hear condemnations from  Miliband and the Labour glitterati? Denunciations from the BBC and the Guardian?

 

Not that I remember.

 

But we now have the spectacle of Miliband starting a PR war with the Daily Mail over a long piece about his old dad and – shock, horror – taking a pic of the old fellow’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, last resting place of his great hero Karl Marx.

 

I was sitting outside ‘The Royal George’ on Saturday afternoon, enjoying a pint and the autumn sun when someone gave me a copy of the Mail (I mention this important piece of information because I would not like people to think that I actually spent money on Dacre’s organ). I pounced on the large spread about Miliband Snr. hating Britain, hoping that there would be some revelations about how he converted Ed into a Commie who would keep the Red Flag flying over the whole nation.

 

And what did I find? That as a 17-year old refugee, Miliband Snr. wrote in his diary that he found his adopted country ‘nationalistic’. Which, of course, is correct. We were solemnly informed that he was a North London  (code for Jewish) Marxist academic, as if we didn’t already know. That was it; a total waste of space.

 

So why Ed has embarked on this public row over a pathetic piece of non-journalism needs some understanding. He may feel that staying on the front page is always a good thing, that the only bad publicity is no publicity, or that this is an opportunity to gather sympathy and public support as a ‘victim’ of the Tory press.

 

In my almost-daily dealings with the media, I had a golden rule of never replying to knocking copy. Unless, of course, I wanted it to run and run.

 

The effect of Ed’s war on the Mail is that millions of people will have read the story who otherwise would not have done so. If that was his intention, he succeeded.

 

And we must not forget that it was Ed himself who put his late dad in the public domain by all that guff about his father being an ‘inspiration’ to him. The public might be interested to know  how  the Leader of the Labour Party was ‘inspired’ by an unreconstructed Marxist.