Let’s play “taunt the toff” and never mind the facts

Robert Harris in The Sunday Times yesterday (pay wall) is too generous to his friend Andrew Mitchell, but he makes some important points:

Even those left-wing papers and MPs who had paraded before Leveson earlier in the year, deploring the relationship between the police and the tabloids, now eagerly repeated the story without once questioning where it had come from. It was time to play taunt-the-toff and everyone could join in. This is what happens when a political leader plays the class war card, as Ed Miliband has so ruthlessly against the Tories: it legitimises dark impulses and makes an unpopular social minority fair game for abuse.

It was Miliband who in his conference speech quoted Mitchell’s use of the word “pleb” as if it were uncontested. This was opportunist and inconsistent. The Labour leader is so proud of standing up to Rupert Murdoch, but when faced with another powerful interest with a questionable relationship to democracy, the police, he takes its side.

How convenient for him that the Leveson report said almost nothing useful about the interface between politicians and the police.

Recent Posts on Eagle Eye

• Will Angelina Jolie Help End Climate-Change Denial, And Help The Republican Party?
• "The Continuity of the State"
• Why the Treasury thinks the deficit rose last year
• Men of Secrets II
• Men of Secrets

• JohnJustice

  And those who are assuming there was no truth in the original allegation should also check their facts given that doubt has been cast on it simply because someone else may have falsely elaborated on it for their own purposes.

• Newsbot9

  No, spamming like you isn’t “growing up”.

• Newsbot9

  Keep supporting harassing people based on their skin colour, spammer.

• Newsbot9

  Yes, you keep trying to tell people, spammer, to go and get a taste of your plans for this country.

  And keep supporting a government which by your “logic” has no mandate to be ruling. As ever, you’re simply trying to restrict basic rights, but you won’t condemn a government which is working very hard to do so for not having 50% of voters.

  Typical anti-British totalitarianism.