Paranoia is the new black

In the TIMES today the big headline is about Michael Foot.

Yes, him. The chap who wore a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph and got horridly criticised for it. The caretaker leader of the Labour Party after the defeat of 1979 and through the early Thatcher years. Chap who lost the 1983 election.

Why yes, imagined reader, he is dead. Has been for eight years and he had been out of public life for some time before that. So this isn’t ‘Michael Foot is dead’.

It’s ‘Michael Foot was a Soviet agent’. Oh, boy.

It isn’t exactly astounding proof if you read the first paragraph (and that’s all I did as I passed by in Sainsbury’s). What we have is a Big Thick Book that the TIMES is pushing by an ex-MI6 chap saying that they (or at least he) thought that Foot had been a dupe but a dupe that accepted money from the Russians and therefore totally unsuited to become PM and that MI6 had issued Solemn Warnings when it looked like people might be so foolish as to vote Labour into power.

I bet you didn’t know this but it seems that issuing Solemn Warnings is one of MI6’s duties under our unwritten constitution. I don’t know what the recipients are supposed to do with them.

Now leaving aside the fact that 5 and 6 were always seeing Soviet agents everywhere except where they were subsequently proved to be why is this a headline now? It’s not even a new allegation: the SUNDAY TIMES tried publishing it while he was still alive and got successfully sued for it, a fact today’s story tries hard to make sound scandalous.

The answer to this makes me worry about my mental stability. It looks very like a propaganda exercise to tar the current Labour leadership with the same brush. I used to believe that people in serious positions of power didn’t play such childish games but in my old age I’m starting to believe the sort of conspiracy theories that I used to despise.

It’s me for the tinfoil hat soon.

Would people pretty, pretty please do something to restore my faith in human nature soon? Before I suffer any more stress and start self-publishing my book that contains infallible advice that all the governments of the world must follow to save the species. I am starting to believe I’m the smartest one on the planet and that can’t be healthy.