Jeremy Corbyn has come under increased scrutiny today after Mr S’s colleague Alex Massie revealed that parts of his conference speech were taken from a four-year old reject speech by the writer Richard Heller.
The Labour press office claim that their straight talking leader approached Heller ‘because JC thought some of his material captured what he wanted to say’. However, given that Heller suggested Ed Miliband use the speech four years ago, it hardly epitomises Corbyn’s so-called ‘new kind of politics’.
With the party playing the incident down, one Labour member is at least feeling more forthcoming. Speaking at the Fabian Society’s ‘week in review’ event, John McTernan — Tony Blair’s former director of political operations — criticised Corbyn for the faux pas. He said that the fact he took a speech that Miliband turned down shows that Corbyn is not as ‘straight talking’ as he makes out:
‘Too many who claim that they were straight-talking will find out this evening that a chunk — the best chunk — of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech was plagiarised.
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