The reason for Corbyn’s limp leadership? He’s hurt his leg jogging
JEREMY CORBYN’S bid to prove he is fit to be Labour leader has come unstuck after a jog in the park resulted in a trip to casualty.
Labour sources confirmed last night that the 66-year-old injured his leg so badly that he broke off from a Labour rally in Newcastle to go to the local accident and emergency unit.
But they angrily denied suggestions by Corbyn critics that the incident shows that his health is not up to the gruelling job of Opposition leader. A source close to Mr Corbyn said: ‘That is utter rubbish – he’s a very fit man.’
The Labour leader has already faced claims – dismissed as ‘categorically untrue’ by his staff – that he had briefly ‘passed out’ from stress in his office last year.
At Westminster last week, critics of Mr Corbyn were accused of reviving the ‘smears’ when he was spotted walking through the Commons with a pronounced limp.
But last night party sources insisted the Labour leader had simply injured his leg after going jogging in a park near his North London home the previous week.
They revealed that shortly afterwards, when he arrived in Newcastle for the Labour North conference, he broke off from the event to go to the emergency unit of the city’s Royal Victoria Hospital.
But a source denied rumours circulating among Labour MPs that Mr Corbyn had fallen when he arrived in the city on the Friday evening around 10 days ago.
The source said: ‘That’s not true. He was limping when he set out for Newcastle and it didn’t get any worse on the way up. When he got to the conference, there was a Labour member who was also a GP and she told him: “You really need to go to hospital. You could have done anything with that leg”.
‘Jeremy really didn’t want to go but the GP banged on about it so much, he did.
‘So he went and had a scan but they told him it was a pulled muscle and he’d be fine in a couple of weeks.’
Mr Corbyn was absent from the Labour event for no more than an hour and an half, according to the party source.
‘He went back and made his speech,’ he added.
In December, Mr Corbyn’s team angrily accused moderate Labour MPs of ‘spreading lies’ about the state of Mr Corbyn’s health and his ability to carry out the demanding role of Opposition Leader. Last night, there were fresh criticisms of the Labour leader for failing to attend the party’s Scottish spring conference i n Glasgow amid claims from Labour sources north of the border that Mr Corbyn had been ordered to stay away ahead of this May’s elections for the Scottish Parliament.
One told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Corbyn’s been told to keep away because he’s frankly just toxic to voters up here.’
But a Labour spokesman dismissed that as ‘rubbish’, saying he had already spoken at the main Scottish Labour conference last November.
He stressed that Mr Corbyn was yesterday speaking at a ‘Labour In’ event in London as part of the campaign to keep the UK in the EU.