The genes we get from the Mail line As Ed Miliband suffers for having a Marxist father, I have a confession: mine worked for the Daily Mail And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. Thus sayeth the rightwing traditionalist Daily Mail, the closest thing in Britain to Fox News and an organisation known to take a biblical view on matters. This is a heavy burden for any of us to bear. In the case of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, his late father Ralph was a committed Marxist. Mine once worked for the Daily Mail. Since we both loved and admired our fathers, these undeniable historic blemishes can prove difficult. Robert Shrimsley Mr Miliband awoke at the weekend to find the Mail depicting his father as: "The man who hated Britain." This is strong even by the Mail's standards, since most of the people it thinks hate Britain are al-Qaeda supporters. For fun, it added an image of Ralph's tomb with the punning caption "grave socialist." The unstated premise of the Mail attack is that since Ed Miliband does not condemn his father outright and sometimes refers to himself as a socialist, he too must be a man who hates Britain. What made this different from the standard Mail monstering was not the focus on Ralph's hard-left views but the use of them to launch an assault on his patriotism, even though he fought for Britain in the second world war. By depicting Ralph, a Jewish refugee, as a foreigner with no appreciation of what it is to be British, the Mail sneakily implied his son is also too alien to be prime minister (Miliband Jr, it should be noted, supports press regulation, which the Mail fervently opposes). Ed navigates his way through this emotional minefield by being significantly more mainstream than his father. His approach is to be "quite leftwing" but nowhere near leftwing enough for his dad. Unfortunately for him, the gulf between not leftwing enough for his dad and too leftwing for the Mail remains substantial. He should not feel too bad about this. David Cameron is also too leftwing for the Daily Mail and he's the leader of the Conservative party. Mr Miliband has fought back, however, winning admiration for an emotional defence of his father. Happily, while Ed regularly suffers for having a father who was a committed Marxist, I have yet to be held to account for having a father who was a committed Mailist. Yet I worry that, tarnished by the "secret shame" of my father's occupation, my disavowal of the Mail line on working women (bad mothers), gays (perverts), the poor (spongers), foreigners (not British, you dummy) and religious equality (anti-Christian) may not convince my chic metropolitan friends. I live in fear of my father being denounced as "the man who hated Notting Hill." Spurred on by the Mail's challenge to the Milibands I now realise that I have no choice but to go for the full Maoist disavowal of my father and his Mail genes, lest I be taken for an old-fashioned little Englander. Some of you will know that, aged 17, my father wrote in his diary about a day when he "cycled into the village for a cream tea and went to see a Gilbert and Sullivan performance in the evening." So let me make clear that I reject this nostalgic, monocultural vision of Britain - although I remain quite partial to a cream tea and a light opera. It is also true that because of my father's Mailist tendencies we often mixed in rightist circles - the so-called Dollis Hill set - which included leading Conservatives, prominent columnists and that man at number 72 with the gammy leg. My failure to distance myself from Dad must also mean I inherit many of his other traits. It follows that I am a fine sailor, although I have yet to test this theory out on water. It can also be very confusing. As a 1970s Mailist my father was a noted pro-European, in line with the stated views of the Mail at that time. But the Mail's stance has since been reversed, leaving me unsure whether Dad's background makes me a man who hates Britain or a man who hates Europe. On the other hand, as the genetic offspring of a Britannia-loving Mailman, it must follow that my motives cannot be questioned when I view the attack on Miliband Sr as vicious, bigoted, distasteful and the antithesis of everything one should love about Britain. There is, incidentally, one upside for Ed Miliband in the whole sorry business. Until now the one thing everyone knew about him was that he elbowed aside his elder brother to win the Labour leadership. Now, thanks to the Mail, he is less the man who knifed his brother than the man who stood up for his father.