‘ He’s a hate figure for ’ Labour’s Right-wing
other things, for the Press to be stateregulated. Today, Miss Robinson is on the board of Article 19, which campaigns for free speech, yet, seemingly contradictorily, counts Hacked Off director and former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris among its trustees.
She’s also a director of the Trust for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), alongside the busybody, popular Press-hating Sir David Bell.
He is founder of the Media Standards Trust, which is at the centre of a wellconnected network of liberal establishment and which spawned Hacked Off, and he has campaigned for more than a decade for stricter controls on the popular Press.
In a shameful episode, a report by the Leftwing BIJ — followed up by BBC2’s Newsnight — led to Tory peer Lord McAlpine falsely smeared as a paedophile. The close friend of Margaret Thatcher died within a year and many blamed the wrong and hurtful allegations for hastening his death.
Indeed, it is intriguing that Sir Keir Starmer, before becoming a Labour MP and after leaving Robinson’s Doughty Street Chambers, was Director of Public Prosecutions when the Crown Prosecution Service took to court 24 national newspaper reporters over payments to police and public officials by journalists.
Nine police officers were convicted, but none of the journalists — jurors deciding that the information the reporters paid for was in the public interest.
To this day, Sir Keir hasn’t apologised for what has been called a witch-hunt.
Miss Robinson is an eager supporter of Corbyn, and her tweets at times read like an exercise in Soviet- style propaganda. Last month, she used Twitter to spread the ‘fake news’ that Labour ‘ won’ the election. Yesterday, her spokesman said: ‘Any sugges- tion she has used personal relationships to further professional ends is false.’
As for Milne, for years, in the great tradition of wealthy ex-public school Marxists, he’s urged the proletariat to do as he says rather than as he does.
He’s the youngest son of Alasdair Milne, a Leftish BBC director-general forced to quit after upsetting the Thatcher government by allowing an interview to be screened with former IRA commander Martin McGuinness (a longstanding chum of Corbyn).
MILNESnr was described by his BBC successor John Birt as ‘an arrogant public school toff presiding over an unmanaged out-of-control institution’.
For years, he was the only former directorgeneral not to have been knighted, and his son’s subsequent journalistic career was once described as ‘one long act of revenge.’
Raised in a six-bedroom home in London’s Holland Park (on his father’s death in 2013, he inherited a third of the £3 million estate), Seumas was educated at Winchester College, where fees are now £38,000 a year, and became politicised at an early age. In 1974, he stood as a Maoist Party candidate in mock school elections (championing the Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung, who killed up to 70 million citizens). After Oxford, he joined the Communist Party’s journal Straight Left before moving to The Economist in 1981.
He joined The Guardian in 1984, earning a reputation over the ensuing decades as one of the most influential — and controversial — figures on the Marxist Left.
Writing supportively about Stalin’s Russia (‘it encompassed genuine idealism and commitment’) and Communist East Germany (‘a country of full employment, social equality, cheap housing, transport and culture’), he called Iraqis who helped the U.S. rebuild their country ‘quislings’.
He described the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by Islamist extremists as ‘not terrorism in the normal sense’, and made headlines in 2014, just after Russia invaded Ukraine, by shaking Putin’s hand at a conference. Milne also went on the pro-Kremlin RT TV channel, to say that Britain was ‘fundamentally misleading’ by suggesting Russia was the aggressor against Ukraine.
Despite his hard-Left principles, Milne doesn’t always practise what he preaches. Shortly after marrying advertising director Cristina, he bought a rambling Victorian family home near the Thames in Richmond, paying cash for the property, now worth around £2 million. He educated his son and daughter at the nearby Tiffin grammar schools, among the highest-performing state establishments in the UK (his daughter got a place at Oxford and his son went to Cambridge). Milne’s Labour Party is, of course, implacably opposed to grammars. Adding to the hypocrisy, his wife works as a tutor helping children of wealthy locals pass the 11-plus.
In his youth, Milne, a natty dresser with snappy suits and Armani ties, had a reputation as a ladies’ man and was a regular at Soho celebrity hangout the Groucho Club.
Recent years have seen him forge a close friendship with Katharine Viner, now editor of The Guardian — lobbying ‘night and day’, in the words of one colleague, for her to get the job in a tightly contested election involving the votes of the paper’s staff.
It was Viner who allowed Milne, in a highly irregular move, to take a sabbatical from his role as columnist and associate editor to work as Corbyn’s chief spin-doctor in 2015.
Many thought this seriously compromised the newspaper’s perceived political independence. It also left Milne with a cosy job and pension to fall back on should Corbyn’s Labour leadership falter.
The arrangement ended only in January but, significantly, Viner’s Guardian was one of very few national newspapers to back Corbyn in June’s General Election.
When Corbyn appointed Milne, it was met with widespread disbelief. Suzanne Moore, a Guardian writer, tweeted ‘bye bye Labour’, calling Milne ‘c**t central’ and adding: ‘I f*****g hate these public school Leftists.’
Lord (Peter) Mandelson told the BBC Milne was ‘completely unsuited to such a job’. And former MP Tom Harris called him ‘a hate figure for the Right of the Labour Party and pretty much everyone else to the Right of that’.
There was but one voice of dissent. On Twitter, a Left-wing lawyer declared: ‘This is brilliant news. Congrats Seumas Milne!’
Her name? Jennifer Robinson.