Mail Labour Spinmeister Hypocrisy

Stephen “Miserable Git” Glover had a question for all his avid Daily Mail readers the other day (Paul and Geordie Bonkers): “His sins make McBride look saintly. So why is Alastair Campbell now treated with such reverence?” he thundered in mock outrage. Glover is horrified that Big Al is still around so long after the departure of Tone, and that he’s “regularly given a platform by the indulgent BBC”.

Why not f***ing kick Jewish immigrants, c***?!? 

He goes on (at length, I’m afraid) “The astonishment for me is that such a man, who did bad things and made so many enemies, should be treated by most of the media as a respectable figure. In particular, the BBC, which he tried to crush in a mood of unbalanced fury, cossets and indulges him ... one day, before he meets his Maker, he will be forced to confront the magnitude of his sins”.

Or did he mean “Dacre”? It does rhyme with “Maker”, after all. But this is unequivocal stuff: Campbell stands duly accused, so what, like the proverbial Romans, has he ever done for us? Well, for the cause of promoting better awareness of mental health – Big Al suffered a serious breakdown, and has to deal with depression – he’s done rather a lot, and only this week, too. Which Glover’s own paper reported.

Glover and his fellow pundits may not care about such matters, but it was partly down to Campbell’s advocacy that Asda was forced to withdraw a “Mental Patient” Halloween outfit, with Tesco forced into similar action over a “Psycho Ward” outfit later on. Asda also donated £25,000 to the charity Mind, whose CEO told that “This really went way beyond the line of acceptability”.

Campbell added “We are trying to change attitudes towards mental illness so people do not stigmatise it and something like this comes along and it just reminds you we are basically still in the Dark Ages ... We are still in the Dark Ages if some of the biggest companies in this country, Tesco, Asda and Amazon think that it's acceptable to sell something like this”.

Added to using his media profile to promoting understanding of mental health issues, Big Al also promotes Leukaemia and Lymphoma research (what efforts the Daily Mail’s pundits make in this area is not known). And of course he is not backward in coming forward to routinely denounce the paper he calls “The Dacre Lie Machine”. So it’s just spite, as is today’s attack on Ralph Miliband.

The latter, from the pen of Geoffrey “Lickspittle” Levy, righteously denounces the father of Mil The Younger (describing him condescendingly as a mere “Jewish Immigrant”) while glossing over his three years service in the Royal Navy. One wonders who hated Britain more, Miliband senior, or a paper that, a decade earlier, had been championing fascism, proclaiming “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”.

It’s all in a few days’ routine hypocrisy for the Daily Mail. No change there, then.