As hatchet jobs go, the Sunday Express’s attempt to smear Labour’s new leader with an “exclusive” tale about his ancestry was rather pathetic.
Its front page story, The evil monster haunting Jeremy Corbyn’s past, concerned “a cruel seducer and despot” who helped to create the Corbyn family’s fortune.
It told of Corbyn’s great-great-grandfather, one James Sargent, being “the master of a workhouse described as ‘a scandal and a curse to a country which calls itself civilised and Christian.’”
The paper quoted a series of accusations about Sargent’s regime at the Rochester workhouse contained in an article in an 1867 issue of The Lancet.
After detailing his supposed iniquities, the article alleged that he had resigned after a poor law inquiry found that “he had seduced one of the female inmates.”
Sargent, said the paper, had eight children, one of whom was Corbyn’s great-grandmother, Emily.
I liked the po-faced response to this astonishing news by Corbyn’s spokesman, Kevin Slocombe. He was quoted as saying: “Obviously, Mr Corbyn’s lineage has improved over time.”
Needless to say, Mail Online picked up this nonsense to add to its growing archive of anti-Corbyn material.
When, I wonder, will we get the unauthorised biography on Corbyn bringing together every hostile bit of tittle-tattle about him so that the Daily Mail - having outbid the Express, naturally - can serialise it with suitably lurid headlines?
