The Labour Party has applied to the High Court in a bid to extend the injunction currently in place on all political media coverage of Ed Miliband. The original nine-month gagging order was taken out the day after Mr. Miliband became leader and is due to be lifted in June.
Deputy Leader Harriet Harman revealed it was a unanimous decision last September to take immediate action in order to limit the fallout following the election of Ed Miliband. “We had to do something or the party would have been finished. By placing a ban on the media running any stories featuring Ed, we hoped to mask his complete and utter lack of policies as well as shielding the electorate from his slightly ghoulish persona. It was a choice we didn’t take lightly, as it is certainly an unusual move to pretend the Leader of the Opposition doesn’t exist. But with the end of the ban approaching we knew we had to go back to the High Court and push for an extension as it is clear the public are still not ready.”
Ordinarily the press would fight such an injunction on the grounds of free speech, but it turns out they joined the Labour Party in a combined application. The editor of The Sun, Dominic Mohan, took up a key role in the legal proceedings. “We decided to aid the Labour Party in this move despite being supporters of the Conservatives who would have clearly benefited from almost any story featuring Ed Miliband. We did it because we couldn’t contemplate a future in which Labour’s nominal leader was given even a single column inch. So the best way to achieve this was to gag ourselves, just in case the urge arose in some mad young hack to try to slip a story past me.”
Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight is another supporter of the extension after confessing he was never sure which Miliband was which. “I know one of them left frontline politics while the other one seems to have completely disappeared. So I’m in favour of the injunction whoever it relates to.”
Harriet Harman says that while the order prevents any mention of Ed Miliband’s politics, she can reveal what he has been doing since last September. “As some of you may know he is shortly to marry his long-term girlfriend Justine Thornton, so in order to earn a little extra cash he’s been moonlighting as a speech therapist, with, if I’m honest, mixed results.”
