HENRY DEEDES: Jeremy Corbyn played a gnarly gumshoe Lootenant Columbo as he claimed the Tories could hand the future of the NHS to Donald Trump in post-Brexit talks
Strewth! Extracting an apology from Jeremy Corbyn is proving a testier task than pulling Excalibur from that ruddy stone.
One by one, broadcasting’s finest lined up yesterday to chance their arm. They yanked, they tugged, they wrenched. But still the stubborn old booby wasn’t for shifting.
Having four times declined Andrew Neil’s offer to say sorry to Britain’s Jewish community during their Tuesday night BBC1 joust, Corbyn was resolutely sticking to his guns.
When Channel 4’s redoubtable Libby Wiener had a crack, Labour’s testy trade spokesman Barry Gardiner lost his rag. ‘Did you have a question about what we’re discussing today or was that an opportune moment to get a dig in about something else?’ he snapped, coils of steam emerging from his lugholes.
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured above) assembled the media on Wednesday for what he said would be a crucial moment
Corbyn appeared on the Andrew Neil show yesterday (above) and failed to say sorry to Britain’s Jewish community
Journalists asking politicians questions they’d rather not discuss? The sheer impudence!
Corbyn had assembled the media to Westminster early doors for what he promised to be a crucial moment in this election.
He claimed to have what in dramatic circles they call a ‘deus ex machina’, like that moment in legal dramas when the Brylcreemed prosecutor suddenly stumbles across a morsel of evidence which swings the narrative in his favour.
Our venue was the Church of England’s HQ behind Westminster Abbey. Corbyn produced Exhibit A: Two heavily-redacted documents we’d already seen concerning trade talks between the UK government and the Trump administration.
‘The Government produced this,’ he said, clasping aloft the document like a preacher from the old West brandishing the gospels. ‘We have got this…’
It was at this moment he delved theatrically into a little velveteen pouch from which he produced Exhibit B: The unredacted version which had never been made public.
How had Corbyn got his clammy hands on these documents? He did not say. Such info was, as they say in the world of espionage, on a strictly ‘need to know’ basis.
Perhaps he and Bazza Gardiner answered a rendezvous with an informant in an NCP car park on Monday night. (Spoiler alert: Westminster blogger Guido Fawkes says they’ve been publicly available on the web for some time.)
During the speech he held up redacted papers which he later handed out to the media
Corbyn claimed these documents were irrefutable proof the Tories are prepared to negotiate away the future of the NHS in post-Brexit trade talks with the Trump government. That included drug-pricing, access to the UK market, the whole works.
Jezza played the role of gnarly gumshoe, Lootenant Columbo of US TV fame. ‘I’ll leave you journalists to comb through it,’ he said, giving a satisfied smirk. A group of NHS doctors in surgical scrubs then handed the documents around for reporters to inspect.
Questions followed. Naturally, everyone wanted to discuss anti-Semitism –causing Barry Gardiner to flip his lid.
Had he and Corbyn really expected us to sift through 451 pages of this supposedly bombshell document in double quick time and ask detailed questions on it?
Of the questions which did relate to the NHS talks, the heavy-lifting was done by Gardiner, possibly because his boss didn’t understand much of it. In any case, by now, Corbyn had largely zoned out.
At one point, as Barry droned on, Corbyn pawed admiringly at that velvet pouch he had carried the documents in, weighing it up, perhaps, as a potential Christmas prezzie for his wife.
More importantly, who had supplied the leaked documents? A Watergate-style Deep Throat informant?
Again, such info was presumably highly classified.
If these documents really were the election game-changer that Corbyn billed them as, he certainly had a funny way of showing it.
He seemed bored and distracted, often bouncing his ballpoint up and down on the table for amusement.
I’m no Bob Woodward but the whole business reeked of what the Tories’ Aussie election guru Sir Lynton Crosby calls the political ‘dead cat’ device.
A hyped-up decoy, in other words, to distract from Corbyn’s disastrous Tuesday night mauling by Andrew Neil.
If so, that’s an awful waste of paper, though at least it’ll make handy firelighter material as the winter weather sets in.
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