Miliband’s fight with the Mail is cold political calculation

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, but it’s Ed Miliband I want to discuss. In particular, his objection to Saturday’s article in the Daily Mail about his father Ralph.

I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Ed when I saw the headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) because a similar piece could be written about my father. May be written about him, in fact, if I pursue a career in politics. Like Ralph Miliband, he was a left-wing intellectual and, while he didn’t renounce parliamentary democracy, he was at one point a member of the Communist party. He left in 1936 after the first of Stalin’s show trials. He didn’t hate Britain, obviously, but then I don’t suppose Ralph Miliband did either — not all of it, anyway.

But my sympathy for Ed vanished when he decided to pick a fight with the Mail over it. I don’t buy the argument that he was moved by a genuine sense of outrage and couldn’t let the slur against his father’s good name stand. To me, it felt like a piece of cold political calculation. Any attack on the Mail is always warmly received by the left and creating a stink about it had the added advantage of distracting attention from the Tory conference. Above all, sticking up for his dad makes Ed look good. It humanises him. Mondeo Man may not get excited by his talk of ‘pre-distribution’ and ‘resetting the market’, but he can connect with a son’s pride about his father.

Some people will think I’m being cynical — and I’m prepared to allow that Ed’s anger wasn’t -completely cooked up for the media. I’m not accusing him of being inauthentic. Rather, I don’t think that distinction — authentic/inauthentic — has any purchase in Ed’s case.