Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

A chilling warning from Corbyn

What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the ‘nonsense’ that he claims they are (they certainly don’t seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press.

In what tabloids might term a ‘bizarre video rant’, Corbyn said the newspapers had ‘gone a bit James Bond’ with these ‘smears’, before warning the ‘media barons’ that ‘change is coming’. Some of his comrades have suggested that this ‘change’ means that Corbyn wants the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry to go ahead, which is something we’ve known for a little while.

It’s tempting to dismiss this video as just the sort of thing Corbyn does – grandly attacking the press on social media in order to rally his supporters, who already despise the mainstream media – but it’s a little more serious than that. You see, Corbyn already has the necessary mechanisms with which to prevent press smears: he can sue the newspapers and force them to prove the truth of the allegations they are printing in court. This is what he threatened to do last night to Ben Bradley, who had tweeted something that the Tory MP was never going to be able to prove. Our libel laws are so robust that people have sued for far less: indeed, a comic is currently being sued by her ex-husband for incorporating details of the breakdown of their marriage in her routine, which must be sending a chill up and down the spines of all those comedians who manage to spin entire shows out of their relationships.

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