As an iconoclastic journalist, I’m used to being attacked.
As an iconoclastic journalist, I’m used to being attacked. It comes with the territory and after 25 years I’ve developed quite a thick skin. But ever since I started leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers to set up a free school in west London, the level of vitriol directed against me has increased a thousandfold. In a bizarre twist of fate, I’ve only become a truly reviled figure since I decided to do something good.
Scarcely a day passes without someone on the left launching a vicious personal attack. I naively thought that my opponents might respect the Sabbath, but last Sunday I had to contend with the latest broadside from Fiona Millar, a former aide to Cherie Blair.
She spent the best part of Sunday morning composing a jeremiad on the Local Schools Network — a website that exists for the sole purpose of campaigning against education reform — that accused the West London Free School of trying to get a group of special needs children evicted from their purpose-built school in Hammersmith so we could move in. A tissue of lies, obviously, but nothing less than I’ve come to expect from the long-term partner of Alastair Campbell.
I cling on to that old mafia cliché, ‘It’s not personal, it’s just business.’ This is the price of being so closely identified with one of the coalition’s flagship policies. American liberals frequently complain that the right has poisoned public discourse, making it impossible to conduct a rational discussion about an important political issue, but in Britain it is the left that is guilty of this. As we saw from the Damian McBride scandal, no blow is considered too low when it comes to discrediting their political opponents.
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