Labour drops its complaint over Mail exposé on Corbyn wreath at terrorist graves

Corbyn’s wreath at graves of Munich terrorists

lABOUR has dropped its complaint against the daily Mail over its coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to the cemetery where terror leaders linked to the Munich massacre are buried.

The party complained to the Press regulator in August about several papers’ coverage of the 2014 event.

last night it emerged it had told the independent Press Standards Organisation that it did not wish to take the case against the Mail any further.

The decision will be seen as a vindication for the Mail’s original story, which concerned a photo, obtained by this paper, of Mr Corbyn holding a wreath only feet away from the graves of terror leaders linked to the 1972 killings.

The picture was among a number taken during a service to honour Palestinian ‘martyrs’.

Buried in the cemetery in Tunisia are members of Black September,

Monument to the victims

the terror group which massacred 11 israeli athletes.

One picture placed Mr Corbyn close to the grave of another terrorist, Atef Bseiso, intelligence chief of the Palestine liberation Organisation. Bseiso has also been linked to the Munich atrocity and was assassinated in Paris in 1992.

labour insisted Mr Corbyn had been at the cemetery to commemorate 47 Palestinians killed in an israeli air strike on a Tunisian PlO base in 1985.

But the Mail found that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr Corbyn is pictured – and in a different part of the complex. instead he was in front of a plaque beside the graves of Black September members.

For two days, labour continued to insist that Mr Corbyn had attended a service to commemorate the 1985 victims.

But Mr Corbyn then went on TV where he appeared to admit being present at a wreath-laying for Palestinian terrorists. Mr Corbyn said: ‘A wreath was indeed laid by some of those who attended the conference to those that were killed in Paris in 1992.

‘i was present when it was laid. i don’t think i was actually involved in it. i was there because i wanted to see a fitting memorial to everyone who has died in every terrorist incident everywhere because we have to end it.’

less than six hours later, the labour leader’s office put out a

Daily Mail, August 11 further statement, this time with an unequivocal denial that Mr Corbyn had laid a wreath at the graves of those linked to the Munich Massacre.

later that week, labour made a formal complaint against the Times, the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph, the express and Metro. According to a story in The Guardian, it told ipso that several papers had misrepresented the event which the labour leader attended.

last night a spokesman for tthe labour Party said: ‘ Our view remains that the reporting we complained about seriously oseriously misrepresented the nature of what took place, those buried in the cemetery and the mainstream Palestinian leaders conducting the ceremony, and these inaccuracies breached the ipso code.

‘Regrettably, confidential communication with ipso was leaked and it was unable to ttrace the source or assure us it would not recur, and we considered that the complaints process was unacceptably compromised. We therefore decided we would not be taking this ipso complaint any further.’

Mr Corbyn still faces an investigation into why he failed to register the Tunisian trip with the Parliamentary authorities. labour says the trip was not declared in the Register of Members’ interests because the costs fell below the threshold for declarations, which was then £660.

Mr Corbyn did not declare the trip despite staying at the five-star le Palace hotel. Critics said it was ‘inconceivable’ that the stay plus flights could have cost less than £660.

THERE I was, thinking myself the world’s wettest dad for feeling the pangs of Empty Nest Syndrome when the youngest of our four boys started at uni, leaving us alone in the house for the first time since the birth of our eldest 26 years earlier.

But now it seems that even the most macho of men can suffer this same aching sense of hollowness and loss when their young leave home.

Step forward, effing and blinding, that muscle-bound tornado of testosterone Gordon Ramsay.

This week, the country’s most foulmouthed and belligerent chef admitted on an American chat show that he’s been going through emotional agonies since he packed off his 18-year-old son, Jack, to begin his course at Exeter.

Indeed, Empty Nest Syndrome appears to have affected him in the strangest and — dare I say it? — creepiest of ways.

Goodbyes

As he told viewers of James Corden’s Late Late Show: ‘I went upstairs to Jack’s bedroom last weekend and I opened the door. His socks and pants are there, and five minutes later I am wearing them . . . I put them on and just sat on the bed thinking, damn, bud, I miss you — seriously.’

Let’s just say that my Harry’s flight from the family nest didn’t take me in quite the same way. But how well I remember the autumn morning seven years ago when we said our goodbyes.

The previous evening, we had driven him to Sheffield in a car crammed with luggage, books, a computer and stereo equipment. After dropping him at his digs, Mrs U and I went off to a B&B, telling him we’d treat him to a farewell lunch before driving home the next day.

But when we caught up with him in the morning, he was surrounded by his new flatmates and clearly desperate for us to leave him to start his new life.

As I noted here at the time, we took the hint, scrapped the lunch idea and, anxious not to embarrass him with any display of emotion in front of his new friends, we said our very British farewells. Everything we had wanted to say went unsaid: how much we loved him and would miss him, how proud of him we were and how sure he’d have a grand time at Sheffield.

Instead, his mother kissed him on the cheek, while I gave him a manly slap on the back and said: ‘ Bye, old chap. Good luck.’

‘ Bye Mum. Bye Dad.’ And that was that.

But I remember best the drive home to London as we embarked on this new phase of our life — alone together for the first time in more than a quarter of a century and returning to an empty house.

As I recorded in 2011, in the car on the way home Mrs U put on the first CD that came to hand, which happened to be the sublime Joni Mitchell’s Wild Things Run Fast. It couldn’t have been a more appropriate choice to reflect her feelings.

She played it again and again, brushing away motherly tears as we listened to the lyrics of Chinese Cafe: ‘With the kids nearly grown and gone/ Grown so fast/ Like the turn of a page/ We look like our mothers did now/ When we were those kids’ age/ Nothing lasts for long/ Nothing lasts for long/ Nothing lasts for long.’

But the full force of Empty Nest Syndrome didn’t hit me until the following days at home, when everything seemed so quiet and strange.

For the first time in an age, every room was immaculately clean. The dishwasher and washing machine stood idle for days. We bought milk one pint at a time, instead of a minimum of four.

There were no fights to break up. There was no stumbling downstairs in the morning to find the house strewn with strange teenagers, slumped asleep on floors and sofas after one of the boys’ nights out with his mates. It was all very eerie and unsettling.

But, no, though I missed Harry terribly in those early days, I never felt remotely tempted to mope in his bedroom — let alone to slip on his underpants or any socks he might have left behind.

Freedom

It sounds as if Ramsay is afflicted even worse than I was. And the remarkable thing is that the nest he shares with his wife Tana isn’t even empty of young.

True, three of their four children have taken flight — with Jack at Exeter, twin sister Holly in university halls in London and Megan, 20, studying psychology at Oxford Brookes. But they also have a 16year-old daughter, Matilda, who as far as I’m aware remains on the family premises. Indeed, her dad says he now hopes she will stay at home until she is 25.

All I can say is: be careful what you wish for, Gordon. If my experience is any guide, the worst of Empty Nest Syndrome wears off after a couple of weeks, to be supplanted by a delicious sense of freedom and calm.

You’ll appreciate being able to watch what you like on TV, without having to wrestle for the remote with a teenager who wants to stick with the football when a costume drama is starting on the other side. (OK, I guess you’d want the football — but you get the idea). You’ll also be able to cook whatever you fancy at home, without having your diet dictated by a fussy teenager. In my case, it was a joy to have mushrooms and green peppers back on the menu when Harry headed north.

So my advice to Mr Ramsay is that he should enjoy it while he can. For in those wise words of the great Joni Mitchell: ‘Nothing lasts for long.’

If his lot are anything like mine, they’ll be back before he knows it, messing up the house, dictating the menu, hogging the remote and leaving wet towels on the floor as if they’d never gone away. Then he’ll look back and pine for a return to that brief time when the nest was empty.

Indeed, no sooner had Harry finished his Sheffield course than he was back at Utley Towers. And there he remains to this day, aged 25, with every appearance of being a permanent fixture. Like so many of his boomerang generation, in these days of astronomical house prices and rents, he can only dream of affording a place of his own.

Bombshell

To be fair to him, he’s not all that much trouble. He’s become semi-domesticated with the passage of the years, cooking the occasional divine curry and just once in a while hanging up his towel after a shower. Better still, he’s learned not to attack me for my Conservative opinions or my support for Brexit, accepting philosophically that he’s never going to convert me into an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn or Jean-Claude Juncker.

Don’t tell him I said this, I beg you, but there have even been moments when I’ve been pleased to have him about the place.

But, oh Lord, just two nights ago Mrs U dropped a bombshell that has sent me reeling. She casually remarked that our 27-year- old — by far the most zealous Corbynista of the four — has suffered some glitch in his flat- sharing arrangements and plans to move back home. He’s expected today.

So I suppose I must just strap on my tin hat and prepare to be lectured ad nauseam about the evil of my old-fashioned Tory opinions.

Never mind that throughout history, every experiment in hard-Left socialism has ended in poverty and misery. In dear Johnny’s view, everything will be glorious when Comrade McDonnell is in charge of the nation’s purse strings, merrily running up the country’s overdraft and transferring ever larger amounts of cash from those who earn it to those who don’t, while Jeremy throws tea parties for Palestinian terrorists next door at No 10.

Hang on, though. Mr Ramsay has given me a brilliant idea. Perhaps I should start moping around the house in the boys’ underwear. That’ll scare them off the premises, if anything will.