Ed Miliband quite normal, shock. No, it’s not a story I want to read either. Like anyone even half way sane, I’m quite convinced that a government of which an unreconstructed Hampstead socialist like Miliband was leader would be an unmitigated disaster for us all.
It would be a re-run of France under Francois Hollande.
Which is why, of course, the mainstream media – doing the bidding of its proprietors – has gone into overdrive doing everything it possibly can to make Miliband look like a joke, to make Cameron look like an effortlessly superior statesman and, why, of course, there has been such a vicious campaign against Nigel Farage, alternating between ignoring him completely (all the Murdoch papers, for example, have been running a strict no-stories-favourable to UKIP policy for at least the last six months) and focussing relentlessly on any trivial incident which shows UKIP candidates in a bad light. This is the ‘anything but Ed’ general election.
I understand the strategy. (If I were a billionaire newspaper proprietor, I’d be doing the same). But my goodness has it made for some ineffably boring coverage. And, perhaps worse, outrageously dishonest coverage. When I see newspapers leading on their front page with a confected story about 100 business leaders writing a round robin to explain why Ed Miliband will be a disaster, I don’t see journalism. I see newspapers in thrall to Lynton Crosby’s spin department.
That’s why, loathe Miliband’s politics as I do and as I’m sure you do too, I’m recommending you at least take a glance at this oddly engaging interview he did yesterday with Absolute Radio. It shows a Miliband we hardly ever get to see on TV because – normally – the Ed Miliband you see on TV is the victim of an interviewer whose producers are muttering into his earpiece: “Go for the jugular! Needle him about his brother! Put him on the spot! Making him look like the ridiculous, geeky, buffoon he is…” (Similar rules apply, of course, to Farage. Problem for his enemies is that he has got so used to hostile interviews he has actually got rather good at deflecting the animosity, not being ruffled by it and coming across very well).
Again, I definitely don’t want to see Miliband as prime minister. But do you know what I want even less? To live in a world where a smug media establishment decides what the agenda is in cahoots with the Westminster class and pushes a particular, self-serving narrative relentlessly regardless of its relationship to the truth.
Ed Miliband may be weird. But he’s not that weird. So remember: you read at Breitbart first…
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