Carole Malone Goes Corbyn OTT

[Update at end of post]

The Mirror titles are the only mainstream papers to unswervingly support the Labour Party. But recently the wobbles have set in, as doubts have surfaced over Jeremy Corbyn’s ability to lead The Red Team to a General Election victory, in a contest which could come all too soon. One opinion poll this weekend gave the Tories a ten point lead, which would be enough to see Theresa May back in Downing Street with an increased majority.

Carole Malone

So today, to no surprise at all, push has come to shove and panic has set in, this being manifested in a magnificent rant by Carole Marole, the intensity of which should satisfy the most discerning rant connoisseur. “Jeremy Corbyn's supporters are like Lenin style bully boys who'd send women to the gulag” froths the headline, and this is where she starts to go badly wrong: Lenin and the Gulag are not contemporaneous.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, died in 1924. The official formation of the Glavnoye upravleniye lagerey (“Main camp organisation”), or Gulag, did not come until 1930. Still, Lenin, Stalin, what’s in a name, provided readers get the drift, eh? It’s the Corbyn lot who done it, although Ms Malone finds it difficult to pony up any evidence.

We read “Angela Eagle has been threatened with death … she has been abused and intimidated in the most hideous ways by thugs acting in Corbyn’s name. She has been called a ‘treacherous lesbian’ and branded ‘as charismatic as herpes’. She’s had a brick thrown through her Liverpool constituency office window”. We don’t know who chucked it, and nor do we have a link between the abuse and Jeremy Corbyn.

This does not trouble Ms Malone, who then goes totally OTT by telling “And then there’s Luciana Berger, who also resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. She was allegedly told she was going to get it just like Jo Cox did’ and was sent a photo of a kitchen knife and warned: ‘Watch your back, Jewish scum’”. Ms Berger has read the Mirror article. But she has also passed severely adverse comment upon it.

She Tweeted to the pundit “I've read your column. For the record, the man who sent me those message has nothing to do with @uklabour”. Indeed he was not, and had Carole Malone read the excellent Liverpool Echo, she would know that John Nimmo, who has now been remanded in custody, was nothing to do with any part of the Labour Party, and certainly not the current leadership. He’s just a sad anti-Semite.

That is not allowed to trouble Ms Malone, who concludes “And THIS is what the once great Labour Party has become - a hate-filled, violent, lunatic fringe where members who disagree with the hardliners are abused, threatened and intimidated into silence”. There are strong opinions held across the Labour Party, but that is no reason to make things up on the fly just because pundits have column inches to fill.

Of all newspaper titles, one should be able to expect the Mirror to report goings-on in the Labour Party accurately. It’s sad that Carole Malone is unable, or unwilling, to do so.

[UPDATE 1200 hours: as I've been reminded by commenters, and should have noticed, another of Ms Malone's elementary howlers was to talk of Angela Eagle's "Liverpool constituency". Wallasey is of course across the river on the Wirral, and so she should have said "Merseyside".

Ms Malone would not have conflated Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead, would she? Another day, another piece of abysmal research]