Let us raise our glasses and toast to the good health of The Daily Mail - but don't swallow, merely woosh it gently round your mouth, pause, and then spit it into the bucket marked BBC! For the past few days The Mail has been running, on page one with banner headlines, a story reporting the fact that back in the '70s/'80s Harriet Harman, her husband, Jack Dromey, and former Blairite cabinet minister, Patricia Hewitt, were all senior members of the civil liberties group, NCCL, which provided affiliate membership and a platform for the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Harman was the chief legal officer, Dromey was on the executive committee and Hewitt was general secretary. The Mail has been running this story for days with banner headlines demanding that the three recalcitrants at least offer an apology for their misguided errors of judgment. Not a word - until yesterday when finally Harman and Dromey issued statements although Hewitt remains utterly silent. Also, and this I think is infinitely worse, we have not heard a word from our national(ised) news broadcaster, the BBC, who resolutely ignored the whole story, even refusing to mention it during their daily reviews of the newspapers. We are taxed via TV licences to pay for this Orwellian censorship department!
The Telegraph reports that Ed Miliband, according to a spokesman (he, apparently, being unable to speak for himself!) is "extremely angry" and had "reached boiling point about what they described as the Mail's "smear by innuendo". One aide said: "This has very much to be seen in the light of what the Daily Mail did in the Ralph Miliband row. They smeared by innuendo and by association then and they are smearing by innuendo and association now." Well, yes, Ed, baby, if you wish to be prime minister and your dad, at whose knee you sat as a child, was an active, card-carrying Marxist who hated British society then we would like to know; and if three of your party's senior politicans were once glove-puppets for kiddie-fiddlers, we would like to know that as well.
