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.