Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour knew about Corbyn and the IRA. Now the country knows

The security services are a rum lot. All that intrigue gets to you eventually, and that’s not counting those who sign up with less than laudable intentions. Harold Wilson was paranoid but not necessarily wrong. 

So when Jeremy Corbyn’s MI5 file finds its way onto the front page of the Daily Telegraph, even those not well-disposed to the Labour leader could be forgiven for arching an eyebrow. Are the spooks spooked by the possibility of Britain’s first Marxist prime minister? 

For those who came up with Corbyn in 1970s and ‘80s, those heady days of the hard-Left when revolution was ever round the corner, this is obviously the case. Their comrade is being done in by the establishment in much the same way as Harry Perkins, protagonist of Chris Mullin’s Bennite potboiler, A Very British Coup. Unable to find any real dirt on him — the best they can uncover is a long-ago romantic indiscretion — the intelligence agencies set to work stitching him up. What Labour MPs would give for Jeremy Corbyn’s sins to be of the flesh. 

But 007 isn’t slandering Corbyn; he really did support Spectre. There is no need to smear a man who volunteers his own prosecution. The Telegraph reports that Corbyn’s activism on behalf of a United Ireland extended to sharing a platform with Angelo Fusco, an IRA terrorist on the run from his trial for the murder of an SAS officer. (He was convicted in absentia.) The paper also alleges that he petitioned Margaret Thatcher for better prison conditions for Hugh Doherty, a member of the murderous Balcombe Street gang who was serving 11 life sentences. As well as bombing pubs in Guildford and Woolwich, they assassinated television personality Ross McWhirter, who had offered a reward for information leading to their capture.

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