Ralph Miliband, the late father of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, was “The man who hated Britain”, or so said a headline on a Saturday essay in the Daily Mail. The thing caused a huge dust-up, due mostly to Mr Miliband’s decision to reply at length, and to the BBC’s eagerness to cover the controversy. Damian McBride, the disgraced but amiable former spin doctor to Gordon Brown, commented that if Mr Miliband had wanted the matter to go away he should have said nothing. Rather as in school history the election of John Wilkes for Middlesex in 1769 broadened out into a bewildering array of questions, so the Miliband row turned into a game of hunt-the-issue. And this was a multi- media show, involving print, blogs, tweets and old-fashioned television. Fo