What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the ‘nonsense’ that he claims they are (they certainly don’t seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press.
In what tabloids might term a ‘bizarre video rant’, Corbyn said the newspapers had ‘gone a bit James Bond’ with these ‘smears’, before warning the ‘media barons’ that ‘change is coming’. Some of his comrades have suggested that this ‘change’ means that Corbyn wants the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry to go ahead, which is something we’ve known for a little while.
It’s tempting to dismiss this video as just the sort of thing Corbyn does – grandly attacking the press on social media in order to rally his supporters, who already despise the mainstream media – but it’s a little more serious than that.
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