Tony Parsons Says BBC Made Him Stupid

As if the attempts by the Murdoch goons at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun to extract something, anything, from their utterly discredited claims about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn having a cup of tea with a Czech diplomat in the late 1980s had not made the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker look stupid enough, along has come Tony Parsons to make the stupidest claim of all. Yes, the BBC did it. Perhaps.

Parsons, who has spent so long as a has-been that few can remember he once scaled the giddy heights of mediocrity at the NME, has tried valiantly to tie up the loose ends from Jan Sarkocy’s claims, Jezza brushing them off, and the resulting press establishment paranoia, only to drop them all in the rush to score another paycheque.

“Why does Jeremy Corbyn get a free pass to attack the press as the BBC sits in silence? The BBC's lack of coverage of these threats only prove they see the Labour leader as a way to block Brexit” he warbles plaintively to no purpose at all. Brexit? Er, HELLO?

“IMAGINE the kerfuffle if President Trump threatened the free press with a punishment beating for daring to criticise him”. We don’t need to: he has denounced much of the USA’s broadcast media as “Fake News”, and his supporters have been threatening journalists.

Parsons isn’t bothered about them. “Jeremy Corbyn openly ­menaces national newspapers and, at our state broadcaster, he gets a free pass”. Had he actually menaced anyone, the BBC might have reported it. He didn’t, so they didn’t. Paranoia is not a legitimate reason for wasting valuable broadcasting time.

Do go on. “The Labour leader’s attempt to bully the press into silence is not even news at the Beeb. Corbyn barks he has no case to answer … The BBC meekly defers to his ruling”. He’s not bullied anyone, merely restated what’s in the Labour manifesto.

Tone isn’t bothered about that either. “Corbyn is deeply embarrassed by the revelations that he met Czech spy Jan Sarkocy in the Eighties”. Doesn’t look like it. “But it would have been so easy for him to neutralise these stories, simply by telling the truth”. We know the truth. Sarkocy is a liar and fantasist, and the Sun’s claims are bust.

But now he’s on to the abuse and smears: “The Labour leader, while clearly having no great love or loyalty to our country, makes a very unlikely spy”. Loyalty smear from someone who wants the UK to be like another country altogether (Japan). Next. “If Corbyn had told us he never had any intelligence to extract, God knows we would have believed him”. Says the world’s worst Sunday columnist. Apart from Dan Hodges.

Still, onwards and, er, onwards, eh? “Corbyn had a chilling message for the ‘press barons’ with their ‘bad old habits’ about the brave new world that would be coming in with a Labour Government”. We know. Part 2 of the Leveson Inquiry and Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. “If President Trump had made exactly that threat, in exactly those words, then the BBC would have been justifiably furious”. Trump isn’t capable of that level of reason.

Then he throws Brexit into the mix: “I know that the BBC sees Corbyn as the last chance of blocking Brexit but its vow of silence on his Cold War shenanigans is breathtaking”. Yes, this excuse for a pundit is now blaming his own paper’s incompetence on the BBC.