Corbyn: playing into Putin’s hands?

“It is bizarre, but oddly revealing,” said Rachel Sylvester in The Times, “that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters spent the weekend [wrongly] accusing the BBC of doctoring an image of the Labour leader’s hat to make him look like a Soviet stooge.” If anything has given that impression, it wasn’t the backdrop used on Newsnight, but Corbyn’s own statements about the Salisbury poisoning. While other politicians reacted with horror to the nerve agent attack, and accepted official claims that there’s “no plausible alternative explanation” to Russian involvement, Corbyn responded by taking the Government to task. Can it prove the Kremlin is involved? Why has Theresa May not sent a sample of the nerve agent for analysis in Moscow? Can we trust the word of spy chiefs after Iraq? The impression is of a man “bending over backwards to avoid blaming Moscow”.

Rubbish, said Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday: Corbyn is just doing his job as Leader of the Opposition. He may be wrong about many things, but “he has a better record on foreign policy than almost anyone in Parliament”. Given the UK’S recent experience of rushing into “foolish conflicts” in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, people should know better than to lambast Corbyn for urging caution. He certainly cuts a “more convincing figure” in this crisis than either the Prime Minister or Gavin Williamson, said Melanie Mcdonagh in The Spectator – the shrill Defence Secretary having declared in a speech that Russia “should go away and should shut up”.

The idea that we were wrong about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and so shouldn’t now rush to judgement is a red herring, said the FT. We know a nerve agent was used in Salisbury and world-leading experts have traced it back to Russia. The Kremlin has denied involvement, but then it also denied invading Crimea and intervening in the US election. Its “well-worn playbook” after it commits outrages is to blunt the international response by throwing up a flurry of alternative explanations and procedural points. With his culpably naive response to the Salisbury attack, Corbyn has played right into Vladimir Putin’s hands. Until now, voters have seemed inclined to treat his foreign policy views as “harmless eccentricities that belonged to the past”. But the present crisis shows that Corbyn’s anti-western world view hasn’t changed – and that it “will matter deeply if he ever becomes prime minister. That is not, to put it mildly, a reassuring thought.”