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Watch: Ed Miliband treated like rock star by screaming girls. Seriously

You have to hand it to Justine Thornton. After her interview, where she alerted the world to Red Ed’s status as a bit of a boulevardier having secretly dated the host of a dinner party she attended, the Daily Mail warmed to the theme. It ran a front cover picturing his conquests: Alice Miles, Stephanie Flanders, and more. And an inside spread (below).

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But as Isabel Hardman noted at the time, it was hardly a slur.

And the relevance to the campaign? Let’s consult the guru of gender politics, Boris Johnson. A few years back, his sister revealed one of his sayings in a Spectator diary:

‘Women cannot resist men who obviously like women’

In other words, women tend not to think: oh, the dirty dog. Boris’s theory is that if you’re known to be a player, active or retired, this arouses a certain intrigue.

The above video, of Ed Miliband encountering a hen party, hardly disproves this point. He’s being greeted like a rock star – or as if he were the stripper for their hen party. All told, it’s not a bad look.

So rather than give a car crash interview, Mrs Miliband seems to have recast her husband as a twinkle-eyed man of mystery. The games, the games.

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