Sometimes an item of news can be both fascinating and completely unsurprising. So it is with the revelation in The Sun (complete with documentary evidence) that as a back-bench MP in the 1980s, Jeremy Corbyn had several meetings with a Czech intelligence officer known as Lieutenant Jan Dymic. At one of these, the man now Labour leader allegedly handed this agent of a communist dictatorship a story about how British intelligence was investigating a suspected “spy” for the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree — down to the detail that the Czech intelligence service (which during the Cold War was moderately successful at recruiting British Labour MPs) had given Corbyn the code name of Cob. But it’s also entirely unsurprising.