‘Broke’ Corbyn almost lost his house, claims author

JEREMY CORBYN has been accused of being unfit to run the country amid claims he nearly lost his house and was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Dangerous Hero, a new book by Tom Bower, also claims the Labour leader abandoned his vegetarian diet after being served meat at dinner with Fidel Castro in Cuba and that he was considering retiring to Wiltshire to keep bees before he ran to be party leader.

One of the claims made in the book, serialised in The Mail on Sunday, related to Mr Corbyn apparently discussing his financial situation with Reg Race, a former hard-left MP and “longtime friend” who would later go on to be involved in a campaign to stop Mr Corbyn becoming Labour leader.

He was reportedly shown paperwork in 1996 that showed Mr Corbyn and his then-wife, Claudia, owed their bank £30,000. It prompted Mr Race to think Mr Corbyn was in “danger of bankruptcy”. Much of the debt was apparently caused by Mr Corbyn paying to open his party office in his constituency and paying some staff salaries out of his own pocket.

Mr Race told Mr Corbyn to close the office but he refused. Mr Race also told Mr Corbyn he had little choice but to sell his semi-detached family home.

The house was sold in 1999 for £365,000 and the Corbyns downsized.

Brandon Lewis, the Conservative Party chairman, said: “What Corbyn has done to his own party is shameful, what he would do to our country would be a tragedy. He is not fit to govern.”

A Labour spokesman said: “Tom Bower’s poorly researched and tawdry hatchet job is packed with obvious falsehoods and laughable claims: from events that never took place to invented conversations and elementary errors of fact.”