The language of public discourse becomes ever more complex and baffling. On the one hand, internet news blog sites are full of visceral insults, often delivered in the name of "ordinary readers". On the other hand, our politicians tread the finest of fine lines from bongo bongo land on. Think of David Cameron talking to Andrew Marr last week about Labour's new economic policy. "It's nuts," the prime minister said, then paused and faffed. "I don't want to get into a huge argument with the mental health lobby." And somewhere between these unhappy extremes sits Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, the journalist most politicians loved to revile last week.

Clear a few confusions out of the arena to begin with. The title editor-in-chief signals only a bewildering variety of roles from paper to paper. Mr Dacre does not edit the hugely separate Mail digital site. Running a gravestone picture online isn't remotely his decision. Nor does he exercise any sway over the Mail on Sunday. If a features executive there is stupid enough to send a reporter to gather information at some Miliband family memorial ceremony, then the editor of the Sunday is quite right to apologise unreservedly and to suspend the non-useful idiots involved. But that can't sensibly be folded into a gigantic parcel of blame and dumped on Dacre's doorstep. A dispute as virulent as the one we have witnessed over the past few days demands more careful treatment than this.

But surely, it may be claimed, the match that first lit these flames – the Mail article that detailed how Ralph, Ed Miliband's dead father, "hated Britain" – was itself a slapdash travesty of truth, with nothing "careful" on display? And that, far beyond the loyalty of a political son to a political academic dad, is also true. Ralph Miliband was a free-range Marxist thinker who dipped in and out of the Labour party. He was a force on the wilder political shores of ideology, fine teacher, good friend and loving father. He was also pretty practised at stirring debate himself. He would probably have found the Mail's broadside entertaining as well as grotesque. He would have shrugged and carried on, as he did through decades of controversy long past. But at this point even more care is needed.

Ralph Miliband came to Britain a refugee fleeing Hitler, fought for it, prospered, wrote and taught, because, even in the depths of cold war winter, he was welcomed and free to speak his mind. If he loved Britain rather than hated it, it was in part because Britain gave him liberty, a home, a family. So care cuts two ways in this debate. The Daily Mail has an agenda to peddle. It conveniently tars the current leader of the Labour party with some very odd brush strokes. But it also expresses an opinion, a view, an argument. That argument may be one that many will find distasteful, but it is one that can never be finally resolved in some courtroom or debating chamber. And, as such, it needs to be treated with commonsensical restraint, not the easy outrage of Mr Blog the Bombast.

Newspaper editors espouse some ridiculous ideas (from doubts about global warming on down). Politicians, their sense of the ridiculous well honed, can also turn Tea Party turtle in an instant. Rhetoric and invective will always fill any stage. But Mr Miliband, having served his father's memory well, is probably wise now to talk of moving on rather than joining Alastair Campbell in some touring version of the old Blair-Brown vendetta drams. Should Lord Rothermere apologise once or twice? It's an uneasy spectacle to see Labour, supposed scourge of the press barons, calling on one baron to sack an editor he's punctiliously left alone to get on with journalism. The ripeness of incipient revenge is wonderfully tempting, of course. But it could fast turn into just another bout of political feuding and facile "hatred" that diminishes everyone involved.

This week, by chance, sees the return of Lord Justice Leveson and attendant press regulation controversies after a long summer of forgetfulness. The privy council will meet and consider the press's own version of a regulatory charter before – much more likely, though possibly after further delay – going on to anoint the cross-party charter agreed one late night in Ed Miliband's office. Sir Brian Leveson, his prolonged period of voluntary silence over, will be invited to tell the relevant committee of MPs what he thinks. Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson see their moment in court draw ever closer. Newspapers, meanwhile, are poised to launch their own new version of independent regulation to discover whether it can find broad public favour. The victims of phone-hacking have neither gone away, nor backed off.

It is deliciously ironic to find the Mail group – perennial hammers of BBC and Whitehall incompetence – caught clutching its trousers in Kensington High Street. Anyone who's ever suffered a Mail slight or winced over a Mail insult – and its assaults can be wounding and damaging to a broad range, including public sector workers, gay people, immigrants, ageing women, BBC staff – can enjoy the revels. But there is serious business to conclude here.

At one level, with or without immediate charter approval, any successor regulator to the Press Complaints Commission will need to be able to demonstrate its manifest independence from the biggest beasts in the newspaper industry (including, of course, the Mail). The chairman and board of a convincing "Independent" Press Standards Organisation can't be placemen and women with vested interests to serve. That's still the impression as matters currently rest, though. David Cameron, let alone many MPs, won't sit silently by if the stitch marks are painfully obvious. Independence needs fixing.

But there is something even more troublesome lurking here, between the genteel language of correct discussion and the hyperbole of the blog. British opinion, scanning right across Fleet Street, is invited to wax incandescent about a reporter at a memorial drinks party or snapped photograph out of place. Quite right, and quite important. But, if you care about real privacy, expressed in the impenetrable encryption language of America's National Security Agency or Cheltenham's GCHQ, then the revelations from the Guardian, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel and the New York Times – the Edward Snowden revelations – simply dwarf such familiar little intrusions.

Most of our press has walked by on the other side. The Mail has snarled, not supported. And there's a grim, growing sense in which Leveson and any concomitant, lawyer-infested regulation in time-warp Britain is as frail as the latest master computer program – and politicians' understanding of it. That's nuts.