Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC, reporting on his speech after the London Bridge attacks, tells us that Jeremy Corbyn has ‘tried to counter perceptions that he is soft on security, including his earlier stance on shoot to kill, which he questioned days after the Paris attack at the Bataclan’. We’re familiar with the claim by now, that the loony lefty hippy was flatly opposed to any lethal force by police under any circumstances, including during such ongoing terrorist atrocities. But at last, Kuenssberg would now have us believe, he’s turned his back on such lunacy.

Corbyn, of course, never took any such position from which to turn, U or any other letter. We know that this was not what Corbyn said because the BBC Trust itself – not Momentum, not Angry Twitter – ruled, less than five months ago, that the BBC report implying this was inaccurate, and ‘misrepresented the Labour leader’s position on the use of lethal force in the event of such an attack in the UK’. It achieved this by mendacious editing, stitching questions and answers together into some misshapen thing. In the BBC Trust’s words, the BBC ‘was wrong in this case to present an answer Mr Corbyn had given to a question about “shoot to kill” as though it were his answer to a question he had not in fact been asked’.

For the BBC now, nearly half a year later, just before an election of staggering importance, to continue disseminating the same unreconstructed insinuation about some pre-existing Corbynite allergy to police protecting civilians is deplorable.

To do so to construct ex nihilo a supposed Labour U-Turn – a sign of weakness – is tawdry.



For the person constructing this schmaltzy narrative of Corbyn’s painful growth, to be the same Laura Kuenssberg who purveyed the original smear? For her to herald Corbyn’s consistent position as, now, a ‘change of mind’ on the grounds that it is different from the position her own superiors denounced her for inventing in her own head for him? That is neck of the finest and heaviest brass.