Credit:PA
Former labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed for a wide-raging piece by Declassified UK .
He was highly critical of the Guardian newspaper. He said: I have absolutely no illusions in the Guardian, none whatsoever.” .
He went on: “My mum brought me up to read the Guardian. She said, ‘It’s a good paper you can trust’. You can’t. After their treatment of me, I do not trust the Guardian.”
One of the most shocking claims he made was that MI5 and MI6 deliberately undermined him.
Meetings with the security services were leaked to national newspapers and Corbyn was certain they did not come from him or his colleagues.
“They were obviously private meetings,” Corbyn told Declassified UK . “We obviously prepared for them and went there. We absolutely did not inform or leak about the meeting at all to anybody. I instructed my office that this meeting had to be treated as completely confidential. And it was. It was leaked by them and it was leaked in a way to undermine: that somehow or other I’d been summoned and given a dressing down. That was not the nature of the meeting at all.”
He adds: “The meeting was a discussion in which they discussed various parts of the world and various issues, none of which was new to me, none of which was a surprise to me. It was about the role of ISIS [Islamic State], it was about the war in Syria, it was about post-Iraq war, Afghanistan…They were well aware of my views on those conflicts and very well aware of what I’d said.”
He continues: “They acknowledged I had a different view from themselves and the government, and the meetings were…pretty frank. Were they aggressive? No. It was an intelligent discussion. Obviously it was all recorded. Obviously it was all then leaked out as a way to be deliberately undermining of me.”
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