Every opposition leader sometimes needs to act as a saboteur. Ed Miliband showed his wrecking skills this week, picking a fight with the Daily Mail about an article it had published saying that his Marxist father ‘hated Britain’. The row overshadowed the Conservative party conference and sparked a debate which informed those who did not previously know (or care) that Ralph Miliband was an asylum seeker who arrived in Britain as a teenager and repaid his adopted country by fighting Nazis while serving in the Royal Navy.