NODDING DOG WHO SUPPORTS CORBYN WHEN NO ONE ELSE WILL
AS a lawyer, Richard Burgon knows the importance of choosing words with care. The Cambridge- educated shadow justice secretary and arch-Corbynite was a trade union lawyer before he became an MP in 2015.
So when asked by the BBC’s Andrew neil last year whether he’d ever said that ‘Zionism is the enemy of the peace,’ he answered emphatically: ‘no, and it’s not my view.’ He repeated the answer to ‘avoid any confusion’.
The Daily Mail first reported Burgon using those words in August 2016 and he did not complain about the accuracy of our report.
However, to the intense embarrassment of the Labour leadership, footage has now emerged of Burgon making just that vile remark at a meeting in 2014. In normal times, a senior shadow cabinet minister, especially one who would be responsible for the country’s legal system if Labour wins the next election, would make a fulsome apology.
He or she could also expect to be sacked or, at the very least, suspended.
But Burgon, 38, has refused to apologise, merely expressing ‘regret’ for the way in which he expressed himself. And, needless to say, the Labour leadership has yet to reprimand him.
The video shows that an MP who is at the heart of the Corbyn project has expressed the worst sort of anti-Semitism, an issue that has engulfed Labour, triggering defections and resignations of senior MPs and threatening to tear the party apart. It is, of course, Burgon’s steadfast friendship with Corbyn – such is his devotion, some Labour MPs compare him to the nodding- dog toy sometimes found staring from car rear windows – that seems to make him unsackable.
He is, however, more than a nodding-dog. Burgon might be compared to Comical Ali, Saddam Hussein’s ludicrous diplomat who claimed during the 2003 Gulf War that there were no American tanks in Baghdad, despite reporters seeing them with their own eyes.
WHEN others may be reluctant to face the media to defend the Labour leader, the MP for Leeds east can always be relied on to parrot the party line.
Brought up by two teachers in the Yorkshire city, Burgon previously organised rock festivals and has remained a heavy metal fanatic since.
As an eight-year- old, he first heard an Iron Maiden song.
Though he was the first in his family to attend university, the world of politics was much closer to home. His parents were Labour members and his uncle, Colin Burgon, was an MP for the party for 13 years. It was therefore unwise of Burgon to attack George W Bush in 2016 for having embraced Hillary Clinton at nancy Reagan’s funeral.
‘What risks faith in democracy is the political class as a club,’ he observed, prompting a withering response from then fellow Labour MP John Woodcock: ‘Like uncles helping their nephews get seats?’
At Cambridge, Burgon got a degree in english literature and chaired the university’s Labour club. But it was not political issues that fed his aspirations – it was contempt for his fellow students.
‘The people at Cambridge were not cleverer than the people I went to school with in Leeds,’ he said. ‘I realised that not only are they well-connected, not only are they likely to be running the country or be in influential positions of power, but actually they’re not that impressive.
‘So why should I leave it to them?’ Sworn in as an MP in 2015, he immediately gained the approval of Corbyn, a lifelong antimonarchist, by prefacing the mandatory oath of allegiance to the Queen by alluding to his support for an elected head of state.
‘As an MP, I shouldn’t have to swear allegiance to the Queen – I serve my constituents, not her,’ he later said.
He nominated Corbyn for the 2015 leadership and was rewarded with a promotion to shadow economic secretary to the Treasury. This seems to have been an unhappy appointment for him.
Spotted in Parliament engrossed in a book with the title Where Does Money Come From?, one Tory inevitably jibed: ‘ not on trees!’ In a Channel 4 interview soon after, he was unable to estimate the size of the national deficit. After Burgon failed to meet any senior figures from the banking industry, the financial newspaper City AM mocked him on its front page with a headline: ‘Have you seen this man?’
While he was evading City figures, he had, however, found time to address the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. The Socialist government of Venezuela’s President nicolas Maduro, similarly feted by Corbyn, has always been a cause close to Burgon’s heart.
even though there is a growing humanitarian crisis, with two million people fleeing the country and inflation heading above one million per cent, he refuses to withdraw support for the leader.
After dozens of Labour frontbenchers resigned in summer 2016, expressing their unhappiness at Corbyn’s leadership, Burgon was promoted to shadow justice secretary.
In an embarrassing interview, he refused four times to deny that Labour would back illegal strikes, saying: ‘Labour stands for a return to the employment practices of the 1970s.’
In other words, the bad old days of secondary picketing which led to the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher the following spring.
When the blundering MP went on the BBC, he was unable to recount Labour’s ‘six tests’ on Brexit, instead, inventing an entirely new one.
At the Labour conference, he leapt to his feet when left-wing MP Laura Smith called for a general strike ‘to bring about the end of this government’.
Thus he appeared to signal that Labour’s frontbench was endorsing the idea of a general strike. This prompted a hasty denial from Corbyn’s office. Burgon bizarrely released a statement saying: ‘I did not give Laura Smith an ovation. I stood up and clapped.’
Despite the mounting criticism of his performance, the Corbyn team remains loyal to him. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has even talked of Burgon as a potential leader. ‘It’s because he is still a true believer,’ said a source.
BURGON himself has encouraged the idea, musing: ‘It’s interesting to speculate, obviously’ but adding: ‘ Jeremy’s going to be leader for a long time.’
He was in a relationship with a hard-Left student politician Shelly Asquith, who is ten years his junior, to whom he became close when they were working on Corbyn’s leadership campaign.
A former vice-president of the national union of Students, Ms Asquith campaigned against the Government’s drive to stop young Muslims being radicalised in colleges, describing it as ‘racist’ and a restriction on free speech.
They went public with their relationship by posing alongside a statue of Karl Marx.
As recently as 2008, Burgon was guest speaker at a Communist Party celebration of the 1917 Russian Revolution. He describes Fidel Castro, the late Communist dictator of Cuba, as his ideal dinner party guest.
When he was in the shadow Treasury team, the Financial Times called him ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s reluctant man in the City.’
In future, he might consider being more reluctant to express such atrocious anti- Semitic remarks – and denying them afterwards.