Tony Blair – the not so secret Leftie

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Consider this: the two opposite ends of the Labour Party in the shape of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn have both just issued New Year messages, a delusion of grandeur in both cases that is enough to have them both certified. No one in their right mind cares what either thinks.

Suffice it to say, Blair laid into Corbyn while Corbyn somehow forgot to mention the election catastrophe (for Labour, that is) and instead announced that his party would be “the resistance to Boris Johnson”. That tells you everything you need to know about Jezza – always the student activist and nowhere near the mature party leader whose mission is to lead Her Majesty’s Opposition. The teenager who thinks that political activism involves rioting in the streets and not trying to find actual solutions to problems. But so bizarre have their ­interventions been that it got me thinking.

Is Jeremy Corbyn a secret agent for the Tories?

Could it actually be that Corbyn is a secret Conservative supporter while Blair is an agent of the dangerous far Left? Look at the evidence. We might have had to put up with 13 years of “New Labour” but Tony Blair somehow managed to create circumstances in which his party tore itself to shreds while being taken over by extremists. Who’s to say that wasn’t his real aim all along? Come to that, is he really anti-EU?

Tooting Popular Front: Mike Grady and Robert Lindsay in a scene from the BBC sitcom Citizen Smith

It was Blair and his cohorts who opened the doors to mass immigration, which any sane ­person could have told him (and many did) was almost bound to create a public antipathy to open borders. And that, as we all know, is the main reason so many voted to leave the EU. Meanwhile, if there is one person responsible for handing the Tories a landslide and, for all we know, the best part of a couple of decades more at Number 10, it’s Corbyn. Who does he most remind you of? Wolfie, the Marxist, Tooting-based urban guerrilla, in the BBC sitcom Citizen Smith, above.

Of course Wolfie was a fictional character, for no one that preposterous could have existed in real life, or if he did – for Wolfie was a young man – would have long ago grown out of it. Could Corbyn have been got at as a youth by the shadowy creatures of the Right and told to embrace such ludicrous and unworkable policies that Labour would never see power again? Has he been a sleeper, just biding his time? Unlikely, I grant you.

But stranger things happen in life rather than fiction. But in both cases, Blair and Corbyn rant on into the wilderness. The grown-ups, meanwhile, get on with real life. Actresses are more than just nude bodies The Trial Of Christine Keeler, the BBC’s new drama, is supposed to tell the Profumo story from the female point of view, restoring some much-needed dignity to the woman at the centre of the scandal.



Sophie Cookson strips off as Christine Keeler

It tells how she was exploited by just about everyone, rather than focusing on the politician who lied. And how have they done this? By getting Sophie Cookson to strip off at every conceivable opportunity, prompting one reviewer to write that it was like a soft porn version of The Crown. And this in the wake of rumours that Ruth Wilson left the TV series The Affair because she was sick of being asked to do so many nude sex scenes. And that was only a short time after Emilia Clarke confessed that she’d been terrified of the numerous scenes au naturel in Game Of Thrones.

So we’re mending the reputation of one woman by demanding that another spends much of her time shedding her on‑screen clothing? Just who is exploiting who now? Veganism is food for thought just not very nice food As if Dry January were not bad enough (and no thanks) we now have Veganuary, in which meat eaters forswear the stuff for a month. Cue a line-up of experts issuing dark warnings that vegans risk a vitamin B12 deficiency, which could lead to irreversible brain damage.