Former BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders criticised on Sunday media coverage of her past relationship with Labour leader Ed Miliband.
Flanders registered her dismay on Twitter after the Sunday Times repeated reports about women dated by Miliband before marrying Justine Thornton.
She tweeted: “Sorry that @thesundaytimes follows Mail in raking over Miliband’s past today. We “dated” fleetingly in 2004. V costly few wks, it turns out.”
Sorry that @thesundaytimes follows Mail in raking over Miliband's past today. We "dated" fleetingly in 2004. V costly few wks, it turns out.
— Stephanie Flanders (@MyStephanomics) April 12, 2015
Flanders, then covering economics for the BBC’s Newsnight, was reported by the Daily Mail to have been “secretly” dating Miliband, then chief economics adviser to chancellor Gordon Brown. While they were dating, Flanders hosted a dinner party at which Miliband met his future wife.
The report followed an interview given by Justine Miliband to the Daily Mirror last week in which she recalled talking to Ed Miliband and thought him “good-looking and clever and seemed to be unattached”. She noted all he wanted to talk about was economics.
Justine Miliband went on to say she was “furious” to discover that, far from being unattached, he was “secretly going out with” the woman who had invited her for dinner. The Mail, in an article headlined “Red Ed’s VERY tangled love life”, later reported that the woman in question was Flanders. (In fact, the Milibands did not get together until a year after that dinner party.)
The Daily Mail seized on the comments to run two pages on Miliband’s former girlfriends. It claimed Miliband had “ungallantly” also outed, in a 2013 magazine interview, his close Labour colleague and shadow chancellor Ed Balls as having also dated Flanders at a different time.
The attack on Miliband, however, appeared to have backfired, with many commentators believing the reports of his fairly standard love life before he met his wife had boosted his image.
Flanders left the BBC in 2013 to join JP Morgan Asset Management as chief market strategist for Europe, and was replaced by BBC business editor Robert Peston.
