26 May 2016updated 02 Sep 2021 4:46pm

Commons confidential: Comrade Corbyn the coverstar

Milne’s messages, Chilcot rumours, and why the Evening Standard may have backed Zac.

Tony Blair’s first flatmate, Charlie Falconer, will find himself in a difficult spot should Jeremy Corbyn stick to his guns when the Chilcot report is published on 6 July. The current Labour leader, a former chair of the Stop the War Coalition, is on record denouncing the campaign in Iraq as an “illegal war” and supporting a war crimes trial for his predecessor-but-two.

Every nudge and leak suggests that Chilcot’s weapon of mass destruction will eviscerate Bomber Blair. The whisper in Westminster is that Baron Falconer might feel honour-bound to quit as shadow justice secretary in the House of Lords should Comrade Corbyn back a plan to send his old housemate to the Hague.

My snout recalled overhearing a conversation in which Falconer’s solicitor wife asked her hubby: “How can you work for a man who thinks Tony is a war criminal?” Please do tell us, Charlie.

Comrade Corbyn is the first Labour leader for many a year, perhaps the first in the history of the class struggle, to be chosen as a cover star by Theory & Struggle, the journal of the Marx Memorial Library. The front-page pose is entirely social-realist by design: the bearded leader is pictured staring purposefully off to the reader’s left – of course. We may be sure that any likeness to an image of Karl Marx on the same page was purely non-coincidental.

An old school chum of the bombastic backbencher Karl McCartney let slip a clue about the source of the Lincoln Tory’s touchiness with regard to his personal brand. Back in 2013, the MP failed to persuade parliamentary authorities to spend £15,000 reprinting his surname on Commons documents, including the Hansard verbatim report of proceedings and business, with a superscript “c” instead of the lower case “Mc” on the line. Perhaps his obsession with presentation dates from when classmates nicknamed him Shergy, after Shergar, the Epsom Derby winner that was stolen and killed 33 years ago. On the upside, equine comparisons never unseated Princess Anne.

Maybe Sadiq Khan’s team, still puzzling over why the London Evening Standard editor, Sarah Sands, endorsed its rival Zac Goldsmith when the Tory was a nailed-on loser, should examine its man’s housing policy. Sands’s purchase of two flats in the redeveloped BBC TV Centre at White City wasn’t exactly the “first dibs” scheme envisaged by the Mayor of London to widen ownership.

Hacks using the Telegram encrypted messaging app, handy for receiving clandestine documents from anxious leakers, were amused to discover that Seumas Milne signed up for the service in May. Corbyn’s spin doctor may be unaware that everybody on the network with his number was notified of the covert arrival.