Mr Corbyn is no peace broker. He enjoys the company of fanatics

At a time of terrorist threat, Labour’s leader must be judged by who he has always associated with

Iwas at school when the Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics but remember it well. The drama unfolded before breakfast time and was still going on in the evening, a day book-ended by terror. The BBC’S coverage was one of the first examples of what we now call rolling news and was marked out by the shocked, hushed and sober commentary of David Coleman, more used to excitedly shouting a British gold medal hero like David Hemery over the finishing line.

For hours the cameras were trained on the room in the Olympic Village where the athletes were held by eight terrorists from the Black September faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Occasionally, a balaclava-wearing gunman could be seen on the balcony as negotiations continued with the German authorities. The kidnappers demanded the release of hundreds of prisoners and then asked for a bus to take them and their hostages to the airport, where after a bungled ambush by the security forces the athletes were all killed by their captors and four terrorists shot dead.

It was in the cemetery in Tunis containing the grave of one of the PLO leaders who masterminded these attacks that a wreath-bearing Jeremy Corbyn was photographed in 2014. The Labour leader appears to have difficulty remembering this event, changing his story several times. “I was present when [the wreath] was laid,” he said. “I don’t think I was actually involved in it.”

Well, I’m afraid I just don’t believe him. More than that, I suspect that when the Israeli athletes were kidnapped, his sympathies lay with the Black September organisation. I am not saying he condoned the murders; but at the age of 23 his political ideology had already been formed.

Nearly half a century on he is like an amalgam of the Robert Lindsay urban revolutionary character Citizen Smith and Chauncey Gardiner in the Peter Sellers film Being There, an old school Trot happiest digging away on the fringes of politics suddenly thrust to the threshold of power. Like Gardiner, he utters banalities that are mistaken by credulous people for deep and original insights into the state of the world.

Over the past five decades there are hardly any Left-wing causes, any guerrilla fighters, any anti-capitalist protestors or any post-colonial movements that he has failed to support. His political CV is a classic of its kind. In the 1980s it included membership of CND; of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a Bennite front to take over the party; of the Campaign for Non-alignment, which advocated the UK’S withdrawal from Nato; and of the committee for Human Rights in Grenada when the Caribbean island was being run by Marxists.

He was involved in Latin American politics as all good armchair revolutionaries must be. Che Guevara and Salvador Allende, toppled by the hated Americans and the CIA, are their heroes. He was a supporter of the El Salvadorean trade union Fenastras, linked to the World Federation of Trade Unions, widely regarded as a Soviet front.

Closer to home he fraternised with Sinn Fein leaders at the height of the Provisional IRA’S campaign, inviting Gerry Adams and Martin Mcguinness to visit Parliament just weeks after the terror group had bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Tory party conference. Since the IRA had tried to assassinate the prime minister and the entire Cabinet, this was an extraordinary thing for a parliamentarian to do. As indeed, was Mr Corbyn’s decision in 1986 to attend a picket outside the Old Bailey to protest at the trial of Patrick Magee, the man who planted the bomb.

By some accounts, the Labour leader was involved in at least 70 pro-republican events during this period. He says he was building bridges between communities and laying the foundations for peace. In which case, can he point to one Unionist or Loyalist event that he attended?

This is always his rationale: I was helping to bring peace. That is why he was in Tunis, apparently, fraternising with the PLO leaders and saying prayers at the graves of those happy to see the extirpation of Israel. How many pro-israeli events has he addressed; how many Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism has he commemorated? His self-defined role as a go-between is a total sham. In short, Mr Corbyn has consorted with extremists because he is himself an extremist.

But at least each one of the bewildering array of organisations he has supported had some direct motivation – they were Palestinian, or Irish, or Nicaraguan, or Cuban. What drove Mr Corbyn into so many arms? He is the archetypal Marxist internationalist, but of the vicarious variety. He will know the words of the Internationale and Avanti Popolo, always sung with fist clenched. He enjoys fraternising with those for whom insurrection is a real and often bloody business.

He is a revolutionary by proxy, the safest kind. The disclosure today that at a London mosque he used the Rabia, the hand gesture of the Muslim Brotherhood, to ingratiate himself is just the latest iteration of a juvenile obsession with any cause that holds the West and its values in contempt. At a time when the country faces a continued terrorist threat, as evinced by yesterday’s attack in Westminster, Mr Corbyn must be judged by the company he has willingly kept.

He is praised by his supporters for being authentic in a world of onedimensional political lightweights and dissemblers. It has become fashionable to say that his past does not matter, that the PLO and the IRA are history, that it is all just a Right-wing conspiracy to paint this latter-day saviour as an out-and-out fanatic.

But that is what he is – a fanatic; and it does matter precisely because he has not changed his outlook nor disavowed his misplaced radicalism in 50 years. Mr Corbyn is at liberty to espouse as many claptrap Spartist causes as he likes and commemorate as many dead terrorists as he wants.

But the idea that he could be prime minister and represent this country on the world stage is unacceptable, and the vast majority of Labour MPS know it. So what are they going to do about him?