I had to defend my dad - they crossed the line by publishing a picture of his gravestone, says Ed Miliband

Talking exclusively to the Evening Standard, Ed Miliband says he was ‘stunned’ into defending his war veteran father against the Daily Mail and that politics cannot be fought in the gutter
2 October 2013
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Ed Miliband looks thin and tense, his pristine white shirt emphasising very dark and wounded looking eyes.

“This is very hard,” he says haltingly. “My dad died 19 years ago, he meant so much to me. I did ponder over the weekend what was the right thing to do.”

This is how wars escalate. Since the Labour leader confronted the Daily Mail over its defiant leading article about his father, the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband - “An evil legacy and why we won’t apologise” - missiles are whizzing back and forth across Twitter and television.

“I was pretty stunned,” said Miliband. He was with his mother Marion, Ralph’s widow, when his office phoned to tell him that the Mail had published a piece accusing his late father of hating Britain. He phoned his wife, Justine, his brother David, in New York and told his mother that he would not let this go unanswered. His mother urged him to tell people that Ralph Miliband could have taken the family to live in America but never wished to leave England. He was a refugee here and believed he owed his life to the British.

Miliband describes a context for his father’s diary entry, quoted in the Daily Mail and written when he was 17. “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist…you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are.”

“It was obviously a shock to him coming here. He was called Adolphe but he changed his name. His landlady said, ‘we can’t have you called that’.

“He learned English living in a single room with his father, separated from his mum and sister, who were in hiding in Belgium.”

According to Ed, his father came to appreciate British values and sensibilities such as politeness and democracy. There is a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. He rejects the suggestion of some of his more indignant supporters that the attack on his father is closet racism. What happened, he said, was that the Mail simply stepped over the line and he could not let it pass.

“Sometimes a line is crossed,” he says. “The next election can’t be fought in the gutter. The most important thing for me was to defend my dad.”

At the centre of military operations, he sits in his Westminster office amid piles of beer and crisps, an office party to celebrate the success of last week’s Labour conference. Now he is casting a shadow across Tory conference as well, with his eclipsing fight with the attack dog of the right.

The left wing commentator Owen Jones predicts that “the Right are preparing an all out war” following the Mail torpedoing of Ed Miliband’s Marxist father, Ralph Miliband. To Hugh Grant and Hacked Off it is a Manichean battle between Miliband and the forces of media darkness. “Warning from Daily Mail. If you stand up to press barons expect to see hero dad smeared,” he tweets.

The most inflammatory defence of Miliband came from the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith who said at a conference fringe event that it was “odd for a newspaper to judge a man on the basis of the history of his family when that newspaper is owned by a family that did more to pursue the Nazi cause pre war than any other.”

Marxist: Ed Miliband's father Ralph Miliband in Petty Officer's uniform
MERLIN PRESS

Last night Alastair Campbell went on Newsnight to escalate the conflict, accusing the Mail editor Paul Dacre of being a bully and a coward. The deputy editor Jon Steafel, in a rare television appearance by a Mail executive, retaliated by suggesting Campbell should know about bullying.

Earlier, the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt shrugged off the Mail attack on Ralph Miliband by pointing out that “he was no friend of the free market and neither is Ed.” And the anarchic Spectator commentator Rod Liddle blogs that Ralph Miliband’s political beliefs are inseparable from a dislike of Britain, so fair dos.

Miliband says that he never sought a confrontation with the editor of the Daily Mail but had to defend his father from allegations that he “hated Britain”.

What he had not expected was the lack of repentance from the Mail. They ran Miliband’s article in yesterday’s paper – but alongside the original article and a leader with the aggravating charge that Ralph Miliband had left “an evil legacy”. They also accused Ed Miliband of wishing to muzzle the free press with regulation.

“Evil is the word that the Mail reserves for mass murderers,” says Miliband. “They published a picture of his gravestone. It crosses the line.

“What is going on is that a characterisation of his views is supplemented with the oldest trick in the book, which is to accuse someone of being un-British, anti-British, unpatriotic. That is the trump card you play to say think how bad this guy is and how bad his son can be. “

“I am drawing a line. We are going to conduct this next 19 months to the election in a way that is true to the decency of the British people. My mum, my brother, my wife all had the same reaction, you could not say that he hated Britain. In time past, people would say, it is the Mail, let it go. But I am not prepared to do that any more. I think it is not about regulation but about responsibility and right and wrong. That applies to the Daily Mail editor as much as anyone else.

“I don’t think you can regulate for comment, but newspapers have a responsibility to society to conduct fair debate. And not to conduct politics in the gutter. I am not going to stay silent and let the Daily Mail do that.”

The Mail’s defence is that Ralph Miliband was not a private individual “but a prominent academic and author who devoted his life to promoting a Marxist dogma which caused so much misery in the world.” And the Mail has also said that the publication of a photograph of Ralph Miliband’s grave alongside the online version of the article had been an “error of judgment” and it was removed when the Labour leader complained.

Ed Miliband spills over with affection for his late father, although he denies that he ran for the leadership against his brother in order to be true to Ralph Miliband’s political vision. “I am constantly coming across friends of my parents who shake their heads in disappointment and say, ‘your dad would not approve’,” he says.

“The idea that I am part of a Marxist plot! Lets have a grown-up debate.”

Ed Miliband remembers a conversation with his father about a year before his father’s death in which he told him of his doubts on public ownership. “I said: ‘You know, dad, I am not going to be a Utopian intellectual. I believe in the here and now. That is what motivates me.’”

His anger over the attack on his father’s reputation is filial rather than ideological. “I miss my dad because he was my dad, because I had been having lots of arguments with him and because he gave me a huge amount,” he says, slightly forlornly. When he told his wife that he was going to take on the Mail he asked her. “Why does this feel so difficult?” She replied: “Because it is about your dad and his memory, it is an emotional thing.”

He also denies that he had a closer bond with his father than did his brother. “My father’s values are important to me and David, equally important. It was not about Marx over breakfast. It was an interesting household, there were interesting people but it doesn’t mean you follow their path.”

Interestingly, for an atheist, Ed Miliband is regularly described by political psychologists as wrestling biblically with his brother David for the love of fathers. In the case of Ed Miliband, he is bequeathed a political father, Gordon Brown, as well as a biological one.

“I don’t buy that,” he says sharply. “I worked for him. I feel we achieved good things but I am moving on and I am my own person.”

Miliband is keen to distance himself from the Agamemnon style scenes described by Damian McBride in his book about the Gordon Brown era. Was that a prelude to the “gutter politics” that Miliband now wants to drive out?

“I think we should try,” he says. “Those kind of things, factions, briefings against colleagues, have no place in my Labour party. I have shown this is not the way I lead the Labour party.” So what happened? He reflects that Gordon Brown’s failure to run for the leadership in 1994 meant “that it was unresolved, it stored up a tension”.

The media’s interest in the Miliband family dynamic can be traced back still to the extraordinary decision by Ed to run against his brother David for the Labour leadership, destroying David Miliband’s political career, and, reportedly, devastating their relationship. David Miliband now lives in New York where he runs the charity International Rescue Committee.

How does he feel about David Miliband now? “Mixed emotions,” he says. “Personally and politically I would have valued having David here but he made clear after the leadership that he wasn’t interested in serving in the shadow cabinet and he has this important job at IRC.” He adds: “We end where we begin with refugees…”

Ed Miliband has a record now in taking on giants, from Murdoch to the Energy Companies to the Daily Mail. What is the pattern here?

“I don’t intent to make a habit of this,” he grins. “But it is important to stand up. I realise what it is means, it is a big thing to do, but you learn in this job that you have to do the right thing and stand up to the strong. I can’t say, when it is about my own dad, that I can’t do it in case it makes Paul Dacre angry. On this, I wasn’t going to back away.” Neither, it seems, will Paul Dacre.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in