LONDON: After months on the back foot, British opposition leader Ed Miliband has found his voice with the phone hacking row, leading the charge against one-time political kingmaker Rupert Murdoch.
Responding to the announcement Wednesday that Murdoch's News Corp. had bowed to political pressure over the hacking and withdrawn its offer for pay-TV giant BSkyB, Miliband said it was a victory for a scandalised public.
But others have noted that it has also been a good week for Miliband, who had been criticised for a slow start since he beat his older and better-known brother David to the Labour leadership in September 2010.
“A Labour leader is born”, the left-leaning Independent newspaper said in an editorial Tuesday, while the conservative Daily Telegraph declared that “Ed Miliband's moment has come — as defender of a free press”.
He was quick to call for the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch's top British executive, when it was claimed last week that the News of the World hacked the phone of a murdered teenager when Brooks edited the tabloid in 2002.
It was at Miliband's request that Prime Minister David Cameron announced a public inquiry into the claims, and it was the Labour leader who tabled a motion in parliament calling on News Corp. to withdraw its offer for BSkyB.
Cameron agreed to back the motion on Wednesday, which became a rare, unified statement of opposition to Murdoch. Hours later, News Corp pulled the plug.
“For the first time, the Labour leader is setting the agenda,” said a commentator in The Times newspaper on Tuesday, adding that Miliband seemed far more in tune with public opinion than Cameron.
The public appear to agree — a ComRes poll for ITV News conducted over the weekend revealed that 49 per cent thought Cameron had handled the scandal badly.
Speaking before News Corp.'s announcement, a senior Labour source said they were “obviously pleased with the way the week has gone, but in all of this we have been motivated not by the politics, but by doing the right thing”.
Only a month ago, Miliband was dogged by media reports that his brother David, the former foreign secretary, was waiting in the wings for him to fail, something David Miliband denied.
At the same time, the Sunday Times published a YouGov poll revealing that more than half of Labour voters did know what Miliband stood for, and 41 per cent said electing him had been the wrong decision.
But Miliband has won praise in the past week for his dogged demands for action on phone hacking, and his constant questions about Cameron's former media chief, Andy Coulson, another ex-editor of the News of the World.
Cameron acknowledged on Wednesday that if it turned out that Coulson had lied to him about not being involved in any phone hacking, it would be “a matter for a criminal prosecution”.
The prime minister has also come under fire for his close ties to News International executives — he reportedly goes riding with Brooks, and attended her wedding in 2009, when he was still leader of the opposition.
Although Miliband has acknowledged that his predecessors have also cosied up to Murdoch and Brooks, he has managed to keep the distance himself.
Steven Fielding, professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, said the phone hacking row had given Miliband a chance to make his case to the public, who had previously shown little interest.
“If he can present himself as a spokesman for decent, British opinion and to cast David Cameron as the man whose been sullied by his association with Coulson, News International and Rebekah Brooks, this could be a way in which he can establish an image for himself that isn't the geeky, adenoidal Labour leader,” Fielding told AFP.
“This could be an opportunity for him to come across as someone who is serious and who is in touch with mainstream opinion.”
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.