After the Daily Mail responded to Ed Miliband’s defence of his father by reprinting the original smear piece (“We repeat this man DID hate Britain”) and running an editorial entitled “An evil legacy and why we won’t apologise”, Conservative and Lib Dem ministers are rightly being challenged to condemn the paper.
Given the opportunity to do so on the Today programme this morning, David Cameron said: “I haven’t read the original article, I haven’t read the reply and so I’m not really in a good place to comment”. He added: “All I know is if anyone had a go at my father I would want to respond very vigorously. There’s not a day goes by when you don’t think about your dad and all that he meant to you, so I completely understand why Ed would want to get his own point of view across.”
But while Cameron’s response was rather mealy-mouthed, Jeremy Hunt has gone even further, refusing to offer any criticism of the Mail and declaring on BBC News: “Ralph Miliband was no friend of the free market and I have never heard Ed Miliband say he supports it.” When a man’s dead father is being described as “evil”, one might have thought that politics was a secondary issue, but not for Hunt.
Nick Clegg, by contrast, whose own family has been attacked by the Mail, has done the decent thing and offered his support to Miliband.
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I support @Ed_Miliband defending his dad. Politics should be about playing the ball, not the man, certainly not the man’s family.
— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) October 1, 2013
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