Ed Miliband blanks reporter asking him about previous comments calling Trump ‘racist’
In 2016, Miliband had been searing in his criticism of Trump during his first term as president.
He said: “The idea that we share values with a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper beggars belief.”
In following years, Miliband also said Trump had “lowered the bar for idiocy” and called out his “peculiar relationship with Russia and most of all with the truth.”
As Matthews asked Miliband about these comments, the foreign secretary gave the journalist no response.
As it's Ed Miliband we must expect some peculiar relationships with language, particularly his own words. He's an ambitious professional politician who may yet have his eye on No.10, but this was the language of progressive media with clicks to harvest. He may well wallow in the language privately, but airing it in public certainly "lowered the bar for idiocy".
In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.
George Eliot - Middlemarch (1871-72)
Ed has never offered us any reason to think he is aware of a world beyond the narrow language of his his own set, yet we are invited to suppose he is a professional politician, currently filling the role of UK Foreign Secretary, one of the Great Offices of State.
2 comments:
I read Middlemarch in my twenties and thought it rather good. Tried it again in my forties and couldn't get anywhere with it. I have no idea what lesson this teaches.
dearieme - I find some books easier to read now than I did when younger and some I can't read again even though I remember enjoying them years ago. It's years since I read Middlemarch but probably could read that one again if there wasn't so much I haven't read and want to try.
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