Corbyn has to do some explaining

RIGHT. Allow me a brief word about my journalistic credentials. I’ve been in breaking news for 46 years. I started as a cub reporter on my local paper when I was 16, was deputy editor of a big circulation weekly in East London by the time I was 19 and went on to work in a string of radio and TV newsrooms. My dad was a reporter, news is in my blood.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to be in no doubt that I understand – to my very bones – what “makes” news, what constitutes a bone-fide breaking story.

So I am astounded at the schizophrenic reaction in the British news media to what is undoubtedly one of the most important political stories of the decade: the disclosures about Jeremy Corbyn’s Cold War meetings with a communist secret agent.

It was The Sun that broke the “Corbyn and the Czech spy” story last week and papers such as the Daily Express, our tabloid rivals and “heavies” such as the Daily Telegraph and The Times followed it up with alacrity. But others, including the Left-leaning Guardian, have studiously ignored it. The BBC has hardly touched it. When the story broke last Thursday I tuned in to Radio 4’s prestigious Today programme expecting some serious analysis.

Nowt. De nada. Zilch. Just a guffawing reference at the end of the morning newspaper review. The omission was so glaring that I thought I must have somehow missed it, but no, the programme that boasts it can “drop a word in the ear of the nation” resolutely refused to put the words “Corbyn”, “Czech” and “spy” in the same sentence.

Andrew Marr’s Sunday show – another programme I respect and rely on for topical debate – was the same. A big front-page lead on the subject in the Sunday Telegraph was airily dismissed as “rather thin” (I thought the opposite) and we were assured it had all been “comprehensively and absolutely denied by all the politicians concerned”. This week a national topical BBC radio discussion programme said it would be “tackling the story” – hallelujah – but swerved it by asking listeners the surreal question: “Do you, like Jeremy Corbyn, have a STASI (communist secret police) file, and are you proud of it?” Uh? To be clear: Corbyn stands accused – and does not deny – of holding a series of meetings with Czech spy Jan Sarkocy during the height of the Cold War. He spoke with him twice in the House of Commons. The Czech told his spymasters that Corbyn was “the right man to give information”.

Corbyn says he had no idea Sarkocy was a spy (duly thrown out of the UK in a string of tit-for-tat expulsions) and thought he was a genuine diplomat. Do me a favour. Virtually all “diplomats” from behind the Iron Curtain were spies, or suspected of being so. This is faux naïvety of the highest order – or, if Corbyn genuinely believed Sarkocy’s cover story, then he was an idiot. This week the man who may be our next prime minister dismissed the whole affair as “ridiculous lies and smears” – but to misquote Mandy Rice-Davies in a different context: “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”

Here’s the rub: Corbyn won’t provide specific answers to specific questions. Simple questions. Like why he met Sarkocy in the first place. Exactly what they spoke about. How long the meetings went on for. If he met other “diplomats” from Eastern bloc totalitarian regimes.

Corbyn also refuses to authorise the release of any Soviet bloc intelligence files that may be held on him (something Theresa May has rightly called on him to do in the interests of transparency). Why? Does he have something to hide? These are chickens come home to roost on the old Marxist’s roof. I urge the BBC and others inexplicably reluctant to cover the story to get on board. Full disclosure and nothing less will do. MURKY PAST? We want answers