MI5 conspiring against Corbyn? I certainly hope so

ONE of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers claims there is a ‘deep state’ conspiracy to prevent the Labour leader becoming Prime Minister.

What’s more, Andrew Murray believes he himself is being targeted as part of a wider plot to discredit Corbyn.

Murray blames the intelligence services for his failure to obtain a Commons security pass despite working for Corbyn for more than a year, and accuses them of planting a fake news story alleging he had been banned from Ukraine because of links to the Kremlin.

In a rambling article for the New Statesman, worthy of Private Eye’s resident revolutionary Dave Spart, Murray writes: ‘The Establishment at home and abroad deplore Labour’s approach to foreign policy more than anything else. They fear the popularity of Corbyn’s opposition to war, backing for global human rights and support for the Palestinian cause and their loss of control over the international narrative.

‘The powers-that-be can perhaps live with a re-nationalised water industry but not, it seems, with any challenge to their aggressive capacities, repeatedly deployed in disastrous wars, and their decaying Cold War worldview.

‘We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder...’

Which branch of the Funny People he suspects of being behind all this — MI5 or MI6 — isn’t specified. But just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re

out to get you. not ANDREW Drummond-Murray, to give him his full name, is precisely the kind of individual the intelligence services should be keeping tabs on.

Often described as a ‘former Communist’, he didn’t join Labour until 2016. He’s another one of those curious, privileged, privately educated, posh Lefties who surround Corbyn. Dad was a stockbroker and banker, and mum was the daughter of a Tory MP.

Murray himself has been involved in hardline Left-wing politics his entire adult life and is widely considered to be an apologist for Stalin. He’s viscerally antiIsrael, pro- Palestinian and a supporter of North Korea.

Currently, as well as advising Corbyn, he also serves as chiefofstaff to Labour’s paymaster ‘ Red Len’ McCluskey at the Unite trade union.

He has worked for the Communist Morning Star newspaper — the Corbynistas’ news outlet of choice — and during the Eighties was employed by the Soviet Novosti news agency.

As to whether he’s a former Communist, all I can say is that in my days as a labour and industrial correspondent, I knew quite a few former Communists. They were mostly old sweats who had left the party when they grew up, especially after the Russian invasions of Hungary in the Fifties and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Murray was still a member of the Communist Party until a couple of years ago, more than a quarter of a century after the Berlin Wall came down.

Even if he’s no longer a cardcarrying member, he has more in common with his old comrades than with most mainstream Labour MPs and supporters.

He says he has no links to Moscow, but backed Putin over the shooting down of that Malaysian airliner and the annexation of Crimea, and has appeared on the Russian-bankrolled RT television channel. Could that be why the Ukrainian authorities branded him part of Putin’s ‘global propaganda network’?

Murray is joined at the hip to Corbyn’s communications chief Seumas Milne, the privately educated son of a former BBC director- general, and another notable Soviet sympathiser. Like so many other committed socialists, Milne sent his children to selective grammar schools. MURRAY and Milne started out in agitprop politics in the Seventies and although Milne never joined the Communist Party — he joined The Guardian instead, which is almost the same thing — they share a warped, Wolfie Smith worldview which hasn’t changed much in four decades.

That both have found a comfortable berth in Corbyn’s inner circle is yet more confirmation of just how far Labour’s centre of gravity has shifted to the extreme Left.

There has been much excitement recently over the reheated revelations about the late Labour leader Michael Foot being a paid agent of the KGB.

True or not, these days Moscow doesn’t have to pay those at the top of the Labour Party for support. Labour’s ruling politiburo is already simpatico.

Corbyn even refused to accept the Russians were responsible for the Salisbury poisonings without ‘incontrovertible’ proof, and called for samples of the nerve agent Novichok to be sent to Moscow for analysis.

It is impossible not to believe that Milne and Murray were 100 per cent behind their leader’s stance and involved in formulating it.

The idea of Corbyn becoming PM is terrifying. So is the prospect of hardliners like Murray and Milne occupying sensitive positions in 10 Downing Street.

Murray might claim the intelligence services are plotting to prevent that happening, but given the way the Tories are tearing themselves apart over Mother Theresa’s botched handling of Brexit, who would bet against Corbyn coming to power?

It would be the most Left-wing government in British history, with the potential to cause untold damage at home and abroad.

If the Funny People are getting jittery, be honest — can you blame them?