Remember Red Ed? Back in 2010, he stalked the land, knifing his brother, eating babies and hating Britain like his father did, rarely off the front pages. Then, for several years during which Labour led in the opinion polls, he seemed to disappear from view entirely. Recently, though, Red Ed has made an unmistakable return. Today it is hard to open some newspapers without finding him at the heart of the rightwing version of the election narrative.

Some of the time, Red Ed is portrayed as a bogeyman – grabbing your taxes or plotting with the union bosses to turn Britain into North Korea. Other times he is dismissed as hopeless – held to ransom by the SNP or a figure of derision for opposing British exit from the EU. The contrast reflects a culture that is uncertain whether politics is marked by importance or impotence. But there is no mystery about the timing of the return of Red Ed. Raw partisan politics requires the monstering of Mr Miliband on behalf of the Conservative party. David Cameron started the campaign this week in a notably personal attack. Several parts of the media are ready to follow suit. Fairness and independent judgment count for little when the future government of this country is at stake.

Some will ask: what’s new? In one sense, that response is right. The aggressive anti-Labour partisanship of some of Britain’s media is at least a century old. Mr Miliband is about to receive the same kind of treatment that was served up to such Labour leaders as Michael Foot in 1983, Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992 and Gordon Brown in 2010. This time, though, there’s an unmistakable extra edge to the process. This time it’s personal.

The big difference between those earlier Labour leaders and Mr Miliband is that he is the one with the temerity to attack media phone-hacking abuses. He is also the one who then embraced the broad conclusions of the Leveson report on strengthened independent regulation. This is an act of defiance against media barons which has not been forgiven and not been forgotten – as Mr Miliband presumably always knew would be the case.

The ideological antipathy towards Labour of parts of the press has old roots. But there is a special post-Leveson sharpness to it now. It cannot be understood except in the context of what Tim Bale, in a new book on the Miliband Labour party, describes as the rightwing press’s “determination to do whatever it took to prevent the election of a government committed to tougher press regulation”.

The power of the press to determine elections was often exaggerated, even in the pre-internet era. Readers were never sheep, doing the bidding of editors or owners, and they certainly are not that in the digital era. Yet the antipathy on the right of the media spectrum towards Leveson’s threat to their autonomy remains visceral. Media treatment of Mr Miliband in the coming weeks will not be properly understood without an awareness of that. Politicians must be able to handle the blows that a free press chooses to inflict on them. But remember that some of those blows are being inflicted not just in the public interest but also to protect a very vested private interest too.