Once upon a time, the Murdoch Sun was shifting four million copies a day. But how the mighty are fallen: now the paper’s circulation is in freefall, it’s descended below a million and a half, its credibility has long ago fallen below risible status, and it’s losing money hand over fist. But the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker have their instructions, and those include putting the boot into Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
This imperative, and the desperation of the Murdoch goons to get something - anything - to stick to Jezza, has led to today’s farcical front page, which attempts to exhume Cold War paranoia in order to discredit Corbyn. “Shock Claims In Secret File … CORBYN AND THE COMMIE SPY … Met agent in Cold War … Targeted by Czechs … ‘Briefed’ evil regime” screams the routinely dishonest headline this morning.
There is no secret - the file the Sun is quoting is publicly available, otherwise they would not have got access to it. ‘Briefed’ is in quotes because it’s a claim they can’t stand up. And as for the idea Jezza met an agent, well, no he didn’t. But his spokesman admitted “In the 1980s he met a Czech diplomat, who did not go by the name of Jan Dymic [the name quoted by the Sun], for a cup of tea in the House of Commons”.
Anthony Glees - an expert con artist
Wow. So what happened? “Jeremy neither had nor offered any privileged information to this or any other diplomat”. Indeed. He was, after all, an opposition back bencher at the time. The spokesman also points out the flaw in the Sun’s rant: “During the Cold War, intelligence officers notoriously claimed to superiors to have recruited people they had merely met. The existence of these bogus claims does not make them in any way true”.
The Czechs had to claim they had done something worthwhile. It would have kept them in London and away from the decaying and disintegrating totalitarian state they had left to come here. And indeed, the Sun ponies up nothing more convincing than “Mr Corbyn allegedly provided a copy of a Sunday People article about a bungled MI5 investigation into suspected Stasi spy Ulrich Kempf”. Cor! Real classified information, eh?
And what puts the lid on this farrago is the Sun’s “expert witness”, Anthony Glees, who claims to be a “Professor”. He scoffs “Mr Corbyn says he didn’t know, but it shows breathtaking naiveté from someone who wants to head the British government”. Well, if we’re going to talk breathtaking naiveté, Glees is the man to deliver it.
You should be getting fired in the morning
He has in turn smeared Universities as terrorist recruiting grounds (on the basis of no evidence at all), claimed that the East German Stasi had numerous “assets” in Britain, often on the basis of nothing more than a mixture of confident assertion and sneering innuendo, and named City University London as one of his alleged hotbeds of terror, his evidence free approach earning this rebuke from its then Vice Chancellor: “I ask that you substantiate your claim or that you issue an immediate apology, remove City University from your list and notify the Guardian”. Glees is a Walter Mitty. He’s a con artist.
Jeremy Corbyn did nothing wrong in his dealings with Czech diplomats. There is no credible evidence to the contrary. The Sun has had to rely on a source that no-one in the intelligence agencies will touch with a bargepole. The whole story is an embarrassment.
So that’s Tony Gallagher one step closer to that P45, then. What a deserving chap.
Blimey. How many politicos have met spies from all sorts of countries "and did not know it"? What a wet flannel of an article.
ReplyDeleteCould this 30 year old non-story be a deflection tactic from this report in The Mirror just last Monday:
ReplyDeleteThe Tories have accepted £30,000 from the wife of a former crony of Vladimir Putin to dine with Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson.
The donation by Lubov Chernukhin, who is married to ex-Russian deputy finance minister Vladimir Chernukhin, comes just a fortnight after Mr Williamson said a Russian cyber attack on Britain’s electricity supply could kill thousands.
Mr Williamson will give Mrs Chernukhin a private tour of Churchill’s War Rooms in Whitehall. He will then host a dinner for her and a group of her friends there after she made a successful bid at last week’s Tory lavish Black and White Ball.
Banker Mrs Chernukhin previously successfully bid £160,000 at a Tory fundraiser to play tennis with Boris Johnson, and also paid £20,000 to dine with Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson in Edinburgh.
Does Tesco really need to advertise in The Sun? Tesco's publicity team need to think of the impact their adverts have when appearing next to utter bullshit.
ReplyDeleteGallagher and co must be evacuating their bowels at the prospect of losing Murdoch's feudal patronage. Expect them to get even worse - and, yes, that is more than likely.
ReplyDeleteHence this load of old hoary nonsense.
But as Gore Vidal once said as the USA went down the shitter, "The four most beautiful words in the English language are "I told you so.""
The Gallagher goon squad and attendant Uriah Creep misinformation clerks are so 1950s.
The game is up for the Sun, nobody takes it seriously, boy even Boris Johnson has more street cred than the Currant Bun prisoners of paranoia.
ReplyDeleteAll it needs now is for Bomber Benn to roll up with more plans to blitzkrieg and Fraud Field to concoct more ways of inflicting poverty and New Labour will be off and running with the Scum and the Heil to try again to strangle everything the Labour Party has ever stood for.
ReplyDeleteBut political consciousness has moved on since then. More and more people are beginning to realise that blue and red tories are actually the same corrupt mentality.
The Scum and the Heil are less relevant with each passing day. Should be amusing, though, as they disappear up their own anal canals in a douche of twisted hate and bitterness.