Jeremy Corbyn spy accusations have been given more credence than is seemly Britain has a curious relationship with spies. We are the nation of James Bond and John le Carré, but also […]

Britain has a curious relationship with spies.

We are the nation of James Bond and John le Carré, but also of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess’ real-life treachery.

We profess outrage at being double-crossed in the service of the Evil Empire but, despite the genuine horrors meted out behind the Iron Curtain, seem unable to resist a whiff of espionage.

The i politics newsletter cut through the noise Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

And so we end up with a week of headlines devoted to a story that in essence is about who Jeremy Corbyn had a cup of tea with in the 1980s.

At the centre of this maelstrom is Jan Dymic, real name Jan Sarkocy, a former Czech intelligence agent with the Statni Bezpecnost (StB) who met Mr Corbyn while based in the UK in 1986 and 1987.

Tall tales

The Labour leader has acknowledged meeting somebody he considered to be a diplomat, but vociferously denies any suggestion of spying, or knowingly talking to a spy. In a video released on social media this week, he went on the offensive against the “billionaire tax exiles” of the right-leaning press for “publishing these ridiculous smears”.

Mr Sarkocy, by contrast, has claimed that Mr Corbyn provided information including, according to reports in a Slovakian tabloid, what Margaret Thatcher would be having for breakfast.

He alleged that other senior Labour figures were paid for information. He also appears to have claimed credit during the same interview for organising either Live Aid or the 1988 Free Mandela concert at Wembley, but that is by the by.

Mr Sackocy’s account has been contradicted not only by Labour but by the director of the Czech Security Service Archive.

‘Lefty pleading’

Svetlana Ptacnikova told the BBC that the archives show that Mr Corbyn was considered to be a possible contact but no more.

“Mr Corbyn was not a secret collaborator working for the Czechoslovak intelligence service,” she said, explaining that a different kind of file would have been opened on him if he was.

Radek Schovánek, an analyst with the Czech Republic’s ministry of defence and veteran researcher of StB files, said that the documents made no reference to Corbyn as a recruited agent, or to John McDonnell or Ken Livingstone.

Asked by the Guardian if he was calling Mr Sackocy a liar, he replied: “When you compare the documents which he had written and signed himself with what he is saying today, based on that he is a liar. He signed a list of documents in the UK which said Corbyn was an intelligence contact, not an agent.”

Lest anyone think this was lefty special pleading, Mr Schovánek added: “I personally don’t like Corbyn. I’m Roman Catholic and conservative, but I think we have to defend people against a lie.”

Suing for slander

Following calls for the Labour leader to allow the release of an east German Stasi file on him, case worker Matthias Dziomba of the Stasi Records Agency said this week that it had identified no such records.

What remains, therefore – assuming that Mr Sarkocy’s words are not taken as gospel – is a question of interpretation. Mr Corbyn met a man from the Czech embassy in the 1980s.

What does this amount to?

According to the Defence Secretary, it amounts to perfidy.

“That he met foreign spies is a betrayal of this country,” Gavin Williamson said after The Sun’s initial revelations last week. “He cannot be trusted.”

Other Conservatives have insinuated that there might be questions to answer. Theresa May has called for Mr Corbyn to be “open and transparent” about his contacts with Czech intelligence, while MP David Morris has suggested that the Labour leader should appear before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Mr Corbyn is seeking an apology and charitable donation from MP Ben Bradley after a tweet, now deleted, that claimed the Labour leader “sold British secrets”.

‘Trade or whatever’

From some quarters, the charge has been lack of judgement. Joe Haines, who was press secretary to Harold Wilson, wrote in the Daily Mail that: “What Corbyn is guilty of, at least, is such astonishing naivety that he shouldn’t be allowed out without a nanny.”

Others have suggested that meetings with representatives from Eastern Bloc embassies were not uncommon.

“In the 70s and 80s, London swarmed with Russian and other diplomats, offering excellent lunches and presents to take home in return for gossip about British politics and foreign policy,” according to William Wallace, a Liberal Democrat peer and former deputy director of the Chatham House think tank, who describes a “paranoid tradition of attacking those who sought to maintain a dialogue with our cold war antagonists”.

Dr Darren Lilleker, Associate Professor at Bournemouth University and author of Against the Cold War. The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945–89, said that meetings with embassy officials were “of an era, these sort of things happened”.

When people on the British left were involved, he said, “it is assumed they are communist sympathisers whereas someone on the right could meet them and it was purely about trade or whatever”.

On the agents’ side of the equation, Dr Lilleker added, “often what they wanted to do was justify their staying in London because they knew how rubbish it was in Prague or Bucharest or wherever”.

Gilding a limp lilly

In some cases, the spies really did have something to report.

Three MPs from the generation before Corbyn, the Conservative Raymond Mawby and Labour’s John Stonehouse and William Owen, were recruited by the StB, and passed information over a number of years. The latter was known within the StB as “greedy bastard”, thanks to his demands for payment and holidays.

In other cases, there was a certain need to gild a rather limp lily, as Viktor Kubeykin, who ran the Labour party and trade union desk at the KGB’s London station in the 1970s, told The Independent back in 1995.

“Many new terms were invented to show we were doing something,” he said, adding that he spent a good chunk of his time collecting clippings from English newspapers to pad out his files. “It was all just a camouflage for doing nothing, a bureaucratic game. The more people you mentioned, the more credit you got, the higher your promotion.”

Could it be, then, that even Mr Sarkocy’s contemporary reports on his meetings with Cob, as Corbyn was codenamed, were – to borrow a more modern phrase – ‘sexed up’?

Muddied waters

“Negative towards USA, as well as the current politics of the [Thatcher] Conservative Government,” the files state, indicating something that most people who had met Mr Corbyn had probably noticed.

In fact, said Dr Lilleker, Corbyn was vocally anti-Soviet as well as anti-American; his position one of anti-militarism and “a pox on all their houses”.

“I have never heard his name mentioned in terms of having pro-Soviet views,” Dr Lilleker said. “Am I surprised the he might have met someone connected to the Czech government? No. He has met with and shared platforms with all kinds of people, whether Sinn Fein or the PLO or whoever. That has always been his MO.”

Why, then, are we still talking about Comrade Corb a week on?

The beauty and the curse of a spy story is the hint of more, lurking just below the surface. That makes it hard to prove a case completely. The water is muddied and tricky to clear.

Waning trust

Labour argues that the whole thing is a “smear” propagated by newspaper owners who fear the fact that “change is coming” in the form of a Corbyn-led government, and the current leader of the opposition is certainly not the first to face the ‘reds under the bed’ treatment from sections of the press. Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband’s late father have all experienced the same.

Perhaps, for others, the story represents a welcome diversion from Brexit and Syrian massacres.

The Cold War is over, notwithstanding Putin’s antics, and few can genuinely believe that a young, left-wing backbench MP for Islington North would have been able to endanger national security even if he had wanted to. And Britain does love to hate a spy.

Whether the whole saga does trust in either politics or journalism any good remains to be seen.