In slurring Ed Miliband's father, the Mail offends a British sense of fair play

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/01/daily-mail-ed-miliband-father

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Now a second iron law of British politics has been broken. Last week Ed Miliband broke the rule that says a shift leftward can never be popular, with his promise to freeze energy bills. Today he has broken another political rule: the unwritten ordinance that states a politician must never reply to an attack from the Daily Mail, lest it merely stir the paper to inflict further punishment.

The Labour leader has written a reply in the Mail to a long article the paper ran on Saturday about his father, the socialist scholar Ralph Miliband. Its headline: "The man who hated Britain". That piece followed the familiar hatchet-job template, scouring Miliband Sr's writings for quotes that could be pulled out of context to show the subject in the worst possible light, in this case as a Marxist extremist. His son's reply states simply: "My Dad was a man who loved Britain."

Sure enough, by showing the temerity to fight back, Miliband has prompted the Mail to hit him again. Its editorial today – headlined "An evil legacy and why we won't apologise" – slams the Labour leader for everything from showing too much public affection for his wife Justine ("yucky") to his support for Lord Justice Leveson's proposals on press regulation (perhaps the root cause of the Mail's ire). It closes with a declaration that if Miliband gets his way, he will drive "a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us genuinely love".

But the Mail may have miscalculated. For in this battle, as he did last week, Miliband will surely command public sympathy. To put it in language the Mail itself might understand, its continuing campaign against the late Ralph Miliband violates every cherished British notion of fair play. Obviously, it smears the dead who cannot answer back. But it also faults Ed Miliband, not for something he has said or done himself but on account of one of his parents. Even David Cameron had to concede on the Today programme this morning that "If anyone had a go at my father, I would want to respond very vigorously." (Tellingly, the prime minister did not go so far as to criticise the Mail for its attack, insisting he had not read the offending article – thereby staying on the right side of that iron law which has restrained every British politician until Miliband.)

The sympathy that will come the Labour leader's way is not mysterious. Most Britons will conclude that whatever else his faults, Miliband cannot be blamed for the actions of his father, any more – in fact, rather less – than the Mail editor Paul Dacre can be held responsible for the Mail's support of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists at around the time Ralph Miliband was a refugee from Nazi persecution. None of us get to choose our parents.

Ah, but he has not renounced or denounced his socialist father, the Mail might reply. But surely most people understand that a son's love for his father is not contingent, or even related to, ideology. Ralph Miliband was a teacher and theoretician; even if his son thought he was wrong, the father committed no deed in his life that merits the family rupture the Mail is implicitly demanding. Even many Mail readers will surely admire, rather than condemn, Miliband for wanting to defend his father's good name.

So much for the general ugliness of attacking a man by attacking his parents. But the specific nature of the assault on Miliband Sr also repels. To slam a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution who within years of his arrival in Britain was serving in the Royal Navy is not only bizarre, it is also directly at odds with the kind of patriotic values the Mail claims to champion. Today's editorial weirdly suggests, on the basis of a diary entry written when Ralph Miliband was 17, that he joined the navy only because he hated the Nazis, not because he loved Britain, which in the Mail's view puts him on a moral par with the Soviet Union. This from a paper which in the 1930s ran the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts".

There are plenty on the left who have long believed the Mail to be a dark, brooding presence in British public life, churning out its daily diet of going-to-the-dogs pessimism. Now many others will see why. For attacking Ed Miliband via his late father, that newspaper has revealed its ugliest face.

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