Mail Miliband Mauling Unravels

As the 2010 General Election approached, the TV debates revealed that the Tories’ campaign was progressing not necessarily to their advantage. Pa Broon was not fatally damaged, and Corporal Clegg came out so well that Lib Dem poll ratings shot up. Panic swept Northcliffe House. The legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre summoned the spectre of his paper’s 1930s friends. “CLEGG IN NAZI SLUR” thundered the headline.

Today, the Mail On Sunday may be edited by Geordie Greig, but today’s preposterous headline, “TWO EDS HID TRUTH ABOUT GLOBAL CRASH”, has the Vagina Monologue’s pawprints all over it. And, like the attempt to hatchet Clegg back in 2010, the air of desperation is all too clear - as it always is when the Daily Mail or MoS has the brass neck to use the word “truth” in a headline.

But let us consider the central allegation, that Mil The Younger and “Auguste” Balls - by happy coincidence, the Mail’s two biggest Labour hate figures - somehow had a sufficiently clear crystal ball to know that the 2008 crash was going to happen. There was, as Captain Blackadder might have observed, only one thing wrong with this idea - it was bollocks. Nobody saw the 1987 fall coming from a year out. And then there was 1929.

A year before “Dark Thursday”, the real speculation, helped along by the holding companies and investment trusts, had not yet ramped up: that can be traced back to the formation of the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation in December 1928. Even when the crash came, as J K Galbraith put it, there was an “unexplained headlong rush to sell” [my emphasis]. A crash is always possible; predicting when is next to impossible.

And there is another fatal flaw in the MoS story: it comes not from any documented source, but the personal recollection of one man, former Mayor of Doncaster Martin Winter. It gets worse: Winter was thrown out of the Labour Party in 2008. Doncaster Council passed a vote of no confidence in him by 42 to 8. He refused to resign and stood down the following year, rather than submit himself to the electorate.

Could it get even worse for the Mail? You betcha, says Sarah: in April 2009, in the MoS - the same paper doing to hatcheting today - Doncaster was called a “rotten borough”, and readers were told “its controversial mayor Martin Winter, has refused to accept responsibility for - or even recognise - the department's chronic mismanagement and lack of accountability”. He wasn’t so reliable a witness then, was he?

And who sent in a team to sort out children’s services in Doncaster, Daily Mail? “Last month Children's Secretary Ed Balls sent in a new management team to take over the leadership and management of children's services at the authority”. So what we have here is an embittered political has-been with a grudge against Balls, who is jealous of Miliband, and resentful at being kicked out of the Labour Party.

That is how desperate the Mail is. But it won’t stop them running with this one all week.