The Daily Mail is disreputable, twisted, tendentious and malignant. Thank heavens for that

For the want of a question mark, the empire was defeated. Something like that anyway. Changing The Man Who Hated Britain to A Man Who Hated Britain? would have saved the Daily Mail an awful lot of bother. Too late for that now. And, of course, there are many people savouring the Mail’s distress. Many more, too, who appreciate the irony of the Mail being the object of this week’s Two Minute Hate. What goes around comes around. Sauce for geese and ganders and all that.

I thought the problem with the Mail’s hatchet job on Ralph Miliband was that it used a very small, rather blunt hatchet. A couple of diary entries, a few quotations from his books and, er, that was it. Surely there should have been more material than this? Disappointing.

Of course, it could also be that the Mail was mistaken. Perhaps Ralph Miliband did not really hate the country to which he’d fled from Nazi persecution. Then again if the Daily Mail cannot accuse Marxist professors from North London – even dead ones – of subversion and fellow-travelling then what on earth is the world coming to?

So there seem to be an awful lot of people surprised by the fact that the Daily Mail is the Daily Mail.