All change at the top

On the day of Ed Miliband’s address to the Labour conference, the newspaper’s ‘star’ political columnist, Richard Littlejohn, wrote ‘clearly some of his [Ralph Miliband’s] discredited ideas have rubbed off on his youngest son.' In the article, Littlejohn reprises his own days as an industrial correspondent in the 1970s; painting a highly contentious picture of a Britain hobbled by high taxes, failing industries and dominated by ‘union barons’. And he warned that Miliband was planning ‘a re-run of the tax and spend disaster movie which got us into this mess in the first place. The Mail’s fury around Miliband’s father continued for a number of weeks, involving the paper in some odd contortions. A related way that the Mail framed Miliband’s ‘otherness’ was to emphasise his background as the son of a Hampstead intellectual who lived a life very different from that enjoyed by the average Labour voter.