Saint Mili….doing the right thing, very slowly

The Labour leader is unmasked – and yet escapes. But his Baldwin moment has opened more doors into Hackgate

It was a normal kinda thang on The Marr Show this morning. Opposition leader Ed Miliband said something sensible, then contradicted himself within ten minutes….and Andrew Marr failed to push him about it.

It’s become a tradition on this Sunday morning format that politicians come on, get into trouble, and then somehow leave unscathed. As Brian Clough once remarked about Glen Hoddle, “He floats like a butterfly, and stings like a butterfly”. It went like this:

Minigland put the entirely reasonable (albeit rhetorical) question, why was Jeremy Hunt happy to accept assurances on the BSkyB deal from people who have broken every legal and moral assurance in the lexicon of ethics over the last year?

Marr then helped him to blather on about a Commons vote next week to scupper the deal, and the pair meandered happily into another corker of an exchange thus:

Marr: You’ve declared war on Rupert Murdoch, haven’t you? You’ll be accused of alienating Newscorp won’t you?

Miliband (performs Amanda Fox impression): Andrew, I just try to do the right thing.

I have no doubt that Mussolini thought it the right thing to declare war on France just as Hitler swept the British across the Channel. I doubt if it was morally the right thing to do. The right thing for the Miliband of Hope would’ve been to start asking PMQs last December, as opposed to last week. For six months, he left the job entirely up to Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. But Andrew Marr didn’t want to get into that. Because he suddenly remembered Tom Baldwin, and asked Ed about that.

Was it, he gently probed, a good thing  for him to hire another Murdochite Trojan horse like Baldwin? My other horse used to work for the Daily Mirror, said Ed. Baldwin is accused of hacking Lord Ashcroft’s bank account said Marr. That is absolutely untrue. Are you sure? Yes.

That was it. With the picador’s lance poised above Miliband’s main neck-artery, Marr moved on. The correct procedure for a fearless newsman would have been to ask, “So it’s wrong for Jeremy Hunt to take Wapping assurances as valuable, but not wrong for you to?”

If Andrew had asked Ed whether he took prescription drugs like the Chipping Norton set, it wouldn’t have surprised me. But anyway, those who were watching and awake will have drawn the obvious conclusion: Ed Miliband is a pathetic, goal-hanging, hypocritical little twerp – and he’s as offside on this issue as it’s possible to be.

It’s perfectly possible that Miliband has always felt vulnerable to the Baldwin connection. If so, he has good reason to. A senior Fleet St manager told me two weeks ago that “From Day One, [Baldwin] has been absolutely obsessed with doing whatever was necessary to get Miliband and Murdoch cuddling up to each other”. Infinitely more serious, however, are the two contagion connections being made by the Ashcroft disclosures: first, that the Labour Party present as well as past is incriminated by the Murdoch axis of evil; and second, that The Times titles were also hiring private ‘detectives’ to hack the phones of the great and not-so-good….because this is, of course, where Uncle Tom used to work. As did Holly Watt, who still tapes people secretly for the Maily Telegraph – which nickname is a reference to where the Tony Gallagher Mafia running the place came from: the Daily Mail….an organisation audited by the privacy quango in 2005, and found to have been using more private ‘detectives’ than any other paper in the Street of Shame.

There are a lot of moths hovering near the flame lit by Nick Davies and others. Like real moths, they are frightened of the flame, but inexorably drawn towards its light. If there is any justice, they will all be incinerated by its heat.

I’m going to sign off early from this piece, because three paragraphs ago I received a potentially explosive text.

Stay tuned.