Michael Fallon’s attack on Ed Miliband yesterday has raised eyebrows – the Labour leader, we are told is too weak to keep Trident while also being a fiendish backstabber who betrayed his own brother.
It’s that latter accusation that has got the Defence Secretary in hot water, with some commentators suggesting it echoes the “stab in the back” myth that was popular in far-right circles in inter-war Germany. Various internal enemies – Communists, Jews, and the politicians of the Weimar Republic -were held to have secretly undermined the German war effort in the First World War to further their own ends.
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