Oh, how I wish more people remembered the recent
past.
Which Labour party
leader was alleged by the CIA and some senior MI5 officials to be a Soviet
agent?
Which deranged publisher
of a mass market red-top newspaper tried to involve the royal family in a plot
to overthrow that same Labour prime minister?
Which Labour leader sued the Sunday Times for libel -- and won --
after it suggested that he was regarded by the KGB as an 'agent of influence'?
Which Labour leader was alleged in the Mail on Sunday to have 'colluded with
Soviet Communists' to defeat the Conservatives?
And which Labour leader was attacked by a
newspaper columnist for having a kitchen that was as 'bland, functional,
humourless, cold and about as much fun to live in as a Communist era housing
block in Minsk'?
In each case, you'll be delighted to know,
the answer is not Jeremy Corbyn. (The correct answers are Harold Wilson, Cecil
King of the Daily Mirror, Michael
Foot, Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband.)
The point being, of course, that attacks on
Labour party leaders for being Communist stooges are about as original in the
British press as complaints about the weather. The recent spate of 'Corbyn and
the Czech spy' stories prove nothing more than a shameful lack of originality
among current editors.
The Daily
Mail has a particularly sewer-like record on such matters. As long ago as
1924, it published the so-called Zinoviev letter, which purported to be from
the Soviet Communist party and which was intended to be highly damaging to the
Labour party. It was, in fact, a forgery.
In 1977, the Mail published a letter that appeared to give permission to the
state-owned motor manufacturer British Leyland to pay bribes to win overseas
contracts. It, too, was designed to damage Labour -- and it, too, was a
forgery.
There is nothing new about fake news.
So what heinous crime is Mr Corbyn said to
be guilty of? He met -- once, or perhaps twice -- a Czech diplomat who turned
out to be a spy. What did he tell him? According to The Sun: 'He reportedly handed over a
copy of a newspaper article ...' Which
somehow doesn't quite rank up there with the blueprint for a nuclear warhead.
Yes, some MPs are spies. Some
have even been Czech spies. Who now remembers Raymond Mawby, MP for Totnes in
the 1950s and 60s who did indeed sell information to the Czech security service
for more than a decade? Oh, sorry, perhaps I should have mentioned: Mawby was a
Conservative.
And of course there was also John
Stonehouse, a Labour MP who served in Harold Wilson's government, and who is best
remembered for his bizarre attempt to fake his own death in 1974 by disappearing
after leaving a pile of his clothes on a beach in Miami. He was arrested a
month later in Australia, deported back to the UK, where he was convicted of
fraud, theft and forgery, and sentenced to seven years in jail. He, too, it
turned out, had been spying for the Czechs.
But Jeremy Corbyn? For
goodness sake, what information could he possibly have had access to that would
have been of the remotest interest to the spymasters in Prague?
Ah ha, says his supposed
Czech handler Jan Sarkocy, aka Jan Dymic. As a result of what Corbyn allegedly
told him, 'I knew what Thatcher would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and
what she would wear next day.'
Corbyn also, according to
Czech secret service files quoted by the Daily
Mail, had ‘an active supply of information on British intelligence
services.’
Right. Deep breath. The
Corbyn-Czech spy scandal boils down to no more than a claim that a young
left-wing backbench MP knew the secrets both of Margaret Thatcher's kitchen and
of her wardrobe, and, moreover, had useful information about British
intelligence.
It is nonsense on stilts. To
publish any of this stuff is an insult to our intelligence. Yes, Corbyn was, and
is, a socalist, and he has never made any secret of his sympathy for socialist
causes. But to claim, as to his shame, the defence secretary Gavin Williamson
did, that Corbyn 'betrayed Britain' is nothing less than a gross calumny.
However, Corbyn's response to
all this has been, I think, ill-advised. His video warning to the press barons
-- 'We’ve got news for them: change is coming' -- sounded uncomfortably like a
threat, and politicians threatening the media is rarely a good look, even when
it is accompanied, as it was in Mr Corbyn's video, by the obligatory 'A free
press is essential for democracy.'
By all means, hit back at the
lies and the smears. But much better not even to suggest that you plan to take
your revenge against the newspapers because you don't like what they write.
That's Trump territory, and it is not where Labour should be.
I much prefer the Michelle
Obama strategy: 'When they go low, we go high.'
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