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Ed Miliband.
Ed Miliband: bulletproof, fiery-eyed and hellbent on destruction, apparently. Photograph: Rob Stothard/Getty Images
Ed Miliband: bulletproof, fiery-eyed and hellbent on destruction, apparently. Photograph: Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Has the anti-Miliband rhetoric peaked too soon?

This article is more than 8 years old
Stuart Heritage

The rightwing press may have trouble sustaining its lunatic pitch of deranged – yet fully justified – hysteria about the threat posed by the Labour leader

Remember Ed Miliband when he was useless? It seems like such a long time ago, doesn’t it? All he ever did back then was blink and stutter and furtively unwrap mints that had long since gone warm in his pocket. He was charming back then. He was a danger to nobody. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe that’s when we should have killed him.

Because now Ed Miliband has turned into a supervillain. He’s bulletproof, he’s fiery-eyed, and he’s hellbent on destruction. All those “hell yesses” and hen parties and hormonally addled young fans have warped his brain against humanity, and the threat he now poses to us all is real and urgent.

I’m not making this up. I’ve read the rightwing papers over the last couple of days, and I know exactly the damage that Ed Miliband will wreak if he becomes prime minister. Theresa May was in the Mail on Sunday, stating that if Ed Miliband teamed up with Nicola Sturgeon – without question the Ursa to his Zod in this scenario – Britain would definitely be plunged into its biggest crisis since the abdication of Edward VIII. And that happened before the second world war so, you know, it must have been pretty bad.

Andrew Lloyd Webber repeated this Miliband/Sturgeon theory in the same edition, issuing dark predictions about pre-Bismarck Germany and even darker promotional shoutouts to all the rubbish-sounding musicals he’s currently working on. And then, in his Telegraph column on Monday, Boris Johnson literally compared Ed Miliband to a bomb. If Ed gets in and enacts his brutal diktat about letting people afford to live in houses, Boris wrote, we may as well just bomb London flat. Look at what happened to Vietnam, Boris wrote. It’s basically the same thing, Boris wrote.

Now, while all of these dribble-flecked, boggly eyed pronouncements about the dangers of Ed Miliband are all undoubtedly important and true, the general election doesn’t actually take place until next week. And I’m worried. I’m worried that, now the right has hit this lunatic pitch of deranged – yet fully justified – hysteria, it has to sustain it for another nine and a half days.

I’m worried that they’ve peaked too soon. Where do you go after calling someone the worst thing since the abdication? Where do you go after claiming that a proposed inflation-adjusted rent control policy is the same thing as carpet-bombing? They’re already red-lining the hyperbole pretty hard. They’ve painted themselves into a corner.

I’m worried that, if these legitimate warnings continue for another nine days, the electorate will simply become deaf to them. This can happen. Look at the Daily Express. Every day, it does its best to warn readers about all the mundane household items that will definitely cause them serious illness. But it does it so often that people simply ignore them now. The dangers are still real – don’t come running to the Express when you and your entire family take an Ibuprofen and immediately die of a heart attack – but nobody cares any more.

And I’m worried that this is exactly what’s going to happen with Ed Miliband. What if, on Wednesday, the Mail discovers that Ed Miliband becoming prime minister would actually be the worst thing since the invention of malaria? What if, on Saturday, the Telegraph reveals that a Miliband-led UK would immediately fall into a miserable state where it’s always winter but never Christmas? What if, the day before the election, someone finds Miliband’s secret plans to abduct the children of the world so he can dress them as monkeys and force them to act as his personal butlers?

Nobody will care, that’s what’ll happen, because they’ll have heard it all before. All the good work of the right will be undone, simply because they massively mistimed their attacks. If there’s a Labour government next month, the Mail and the Telegraph will only have themselves to blame.

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