Foolish Labour trio could soon be UK's most powerful leaders

Jeremy Corbyn is now having to insist that he was “absolutely not” honouring Atef Bseiso, one of the terrorists involved in the Munich Olympics massacre, when he laid a wreath at a Palestinian conference in Tunisia for those killed by an Israeli air raid on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and on the graves of people “killed by Mossad agents in Paris”.

This weekend the Labour leader has again been claiming that his various former links to Irish republicans was not a reflection of any support for their bombing campaigns.

His proposed home secretary Diane Abbott has tried to distance herself from claims she backed the IRA in the 1980s.

And the shadow chancellor John McConnell recently apologised for his one-time fulsome praise for the IRA.

This trio could soon be the most powerful three politicians in the land, if Labour succeeds in continuing to close the gap with the Conservatives.

In addition to his party’s improved polling, Mr Corbyn’s personal opinion poll ratings have climbed sharply while Theresa May’s have fallen sharply.

These three Labour politicians are insisting that they did not support IRA violence. In that case, their indulgent attitude towards republican terrorists is a reflection of naivete on such a scale that they should get nowhere near power.

The problem is much greater than that trio of fools. Utterances by politicians on both sides of the Irish border who are not in Sinn Fein increasingly refer to the IRA and the state forces as if they were equally culpable during the Troubles.

No wonder increasing numbers of politicians have this view given the distortions that are peddled about ‘collusion’.

The IRA narrative has also been assisted by the imbalanced legacy investigations in Northern Ireland.