Questions Mr Corbyn still won’t answer
IF Jeremy Corbyn wished to lay to rest questions about his loyalty to Britain and his relationship with Iron Curtain countries during the Cold War, several options were open to him.
He could have given a full account of his contacts with a Czech diplomat who was later exposed as a spy, telling the public exactly what he discussed with Jan Sarkocy and his purpose in meeting him on several occasions in the 1980s.
He could also have submitted himself to in-depth questioning by an all-party Commons committee on security or foreign affairs. Better still, he could have demonstrated a clear conscience by authorising Berlin to release files kept on him by East Germany’s secret police – if any such records exist.
But Mr Corbyn has done none of these things since last Thursday, when The Sun published disturbing extracts from the Czech intelligence service’s official archives. Instead, he and his inner circle have chosen to launch a menacing attack on conservativeleaning newspapers, including the Mail, for daring to draw public attention to this new evidence of his murky past.
In an unmistakable threat to the freedom of the Press to criticise the hard-Left, he declares in a video that media bosses are right to be worried about a Labour government.
‘We’ve got news for them,’ he says, adding with a chill smile: ‘Change is coming.’
As for the entries in the Czech archives – describing him as ‘right person for fulfilling the task and giving information’, with ‘an active supply of information on British intelligence services’ – he makes no attempt to address any of the questions they raise.
Instead, he seeks to laugh them off and his clear message is that under Labour, the Press would have been banned from quoting from the archives or interviewing Mr Sarkocy, and the public would have been kept in the dark.
Echoing Mr Corbyn, Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson also concentrated his fire on the ‘Tory Press’. ‘Unfortunately for these newspapers,’ he said, ‘the years of slurs, of stretching the truth to breaking point, of completely one-sided reporting, may be creeping up on them’.
Leave aside the breathtaking hypocrisy of this master of smear campaigns. Indeed, it was Mr Watson who enthusiastically peddled the fantasies of ‘Nick’ about a Westminster paedophile ring.
How can anyone honestly believe it’s of no public interest that Mr Corbyn was marked down by a spy for communist Czechoslovakia as a potentially useful source of information on Britain’s security services?
Indeed, the one good that has come from his folksy video is that it has at last shaken the BBC out of its shameful reluctance to refer to last week’s revelations.
One thing is certain. The Labour leader’s attempts to laugh off the Czech archives and gag the Press have served only to heighten suspicions that he has something to hide. Indeed, the question he leaves unanswered can be summed up in a handful of words: ‘When Britain’s interests are threatened, whose side is he on?’