This morning Jeremy Corbyn has woken up to find his face plastered across the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Times following ‘traingate‘. After Corbyn appeared in a video calling for the railways to be re-nationalised while sitting on the floor of a ‘ram-packed’ Virgin train, the company hit back. On Tuesday, Richard Branson’s team released a press release and CCTV footage which appears to show that Corbyn did have a seat after all.
As the media feasted on the footage yesterday, Corbyn’s team first dismissed the claims as a ‘lie’ before offering an alternative account several hours later. Now with the spin machine firmly back in action, the Labour leader’s campaign manager appeared on Today for an exercise in damage limitation.
While he admitted that Corbyn did have a seat in the end, Tarry went on to claim that the bigger issue at hand was actually Branson — the tax exile. Moving the debate away from the photo evidence, he said that it was ‘quite astonishing’ that a ‘tax exile of more than ten years’ decides to ‘lay into and make a political intervention on social media in a very public way’.
Of course what Tarry fails to acknowledge is that it was Corbyn who started it. Had social media savvy Corbyn not used the — now very questionable — seat situation to call for re-nationalisation, Branson would have had no need to intervene and defend his company’s reputation — and future.
However, Corbyn’s team are unlikely to be bothered by a little detail like this. Even as the CCTV footage was released with time stamps, true believers were quick to dispute train timetables and claim it was all a conspiracy. What’s more, by painting the situation as unjust — and Branson as a corporate businessman unfairly picking on the little guy — Corbyn’s campaign know they will be appealing to the party membership. This is why ‘traingate’ is unlikely to have much, if any, impact on the current leadership election result — even if it does raise valid questions about Corbyn’s brand of ‘straight-talking, honest politics’.
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