Labour fury as former MI6 chief tells of fears over Corbyn
LABOUR was locked in a row with the former head of MI6 last night after he said he was ‘troubled’ by Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘past associations’.
Sir Richard Dearlove said the intelligence community was concerned about the Labour leader’s closeness to power.
Appearing on Sky News, Sir Richard said: ‘Someone coming from my background is troubled by Jeremy Corbyn’s past associations, some of which I find surprising and worrying.
‘He may have abandoned them now but I don’t think he can entirely, as it were, dump your past.’ Sir Richard told Sophy Ridge on Sunday: ‘He’s enthusiastically associated himself with groups and interests which I would not say were the friends of the British nation.’
As a backbencher, Mr Corbyn invited IRA members to the House of Commons weeks after the bombing of the Tory Party conference in Brighton in 1984 and called Palestinian terror group Hamas ‘friends’.
‘Troubled by his past associations’
Recently he was criticised for having attended a wreath-laying ceremony in a Tunisian cemetery where members of the terror group which killed 11 Israelis in the 1972 Munich Olympics attack are buried.
Sir Richard, who was head of the Secret Intelligence Service from 1999 to 2004, also dismissed conspiracy theories put forward by Mr Corbyn’s aides that a ‘deep state’ was working to stop the Labour leader from forming a government. He said: ‘It’s rubbish. I think every government has been loyally served by the British security and intelligence community.’
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell dismissed Sir Richard’s comments about Mr Corbyn – describing him as ‘a reactionary member of the establishment’.
Mr McDonnell, also appearing on Sophy Ridge on Sunday, said: ‘Well I’m not surprised. Look, this is a member, a reactionary member, of the establishment, so I don’t think he’d welcome a Labour government of any sort, to be frank.
‘Can I just say to him directly, I think he should spend his retirement in quiet contemplation of the role that he played with regard to the Iraq war where over half a million people at least were killed.’