The row between Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail continued on Tuesday night as a senior executive from the newspaper refused to apologise for its attack on the Labour leader's late father but admitted that publishing a photograph of his gravestone with a pun about him being a "grave socialist" was an error of judgment.
In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight, the paper's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, refused to retract the paper's savage attack on Ralph Miliband in an article in Saturday's edition headlined: The man who hated Britain.
Steafel's appearance was an unprecedented public outing for a Mail executive. The paper's editor pursues a strict policy of being an "outsider" who believes his journalism can speak for itself and refuses to publicly pronounce on his paper over the decades he has been at the helm.
He said the piece was based on Miliband's public views and was justified. "Ralph Miliband's views were spread widely. His views on British institutions, from our schools to our royal family to our military, to our universities to the church. What he said was, he felt that all of those things were bad aspects, were unfortunate aspects of British life," Steafel said.
He said Miliband's father's views expressed in his "writings, his diaries, his books, his speeches", combined with his Marxist ideology, showed he was "very antipathetic to the views of a lot of British people". He added: "We thought it was reasonable to highlight those views." » | Lisa O’Carroll | Wednesday, October 02, 2013
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