Jeremy Corbyn was more of a misguided fool than a traitor for cosying up to his Czech mate

Codename COB, eh? What did it stand for? Is it the international flight code for an imaginary Corbyn airport? Or an acronym: “Carrots or Broccoli”, say, or “Communism or Bust”? We may never know. Still, this was the codename a Czech “diplomat” called Jan Sarkocy claims he bestowed on the future Labour leader when they met in the late Eighties.

Now it’s suggested that Corbyn was a commie fifth-columnist. The Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson — desperate to improve his Tory leadership chances — huffs and puffs about “betrayal”.

Let’s try to look at it through the eyes of Corbyn in the late Eighties. He’s approached by a “diplomat” from a communist regime. Does he suspect him of being a spy? If he doesn’t, he’s a nit. Does he see this as the opportunity to betray his country in the hopes of bringing about a proletarian revolution? If he does, he’s a nit. And even if that was the intention, Agent COB didn’t come up with the goods.

A rigorous debriefing by the Czech superspy over a cup of tea found the young backbencher was “negative towards the US, as well as the current politics of the Conservative government”. This would not have been hard to discover from Corbyn’s public pronouncements, had any of them been much reported.

Would Corbyn have been a useful source of classified information? You’d have to doubt it. Our own security services were taking a closer interest in him than those of any foreign power, and he wasn’t about to be trusted with the launch codes for the deterrent. Corbyn’s spokesman says that he “neither had nor offered any privileged information”. You can take that to the bank.

So what was going on? Something more like diplomacy than espionage. A cup of tea in the Commons isn’t super-covert, as contacts go. Even if Corbyn popped into the Czech Embassy now and again, it’s not exactly a dead drop in a Berlin backstreet: MI5 will have kept a vague eye on the front door of communist embassies in the late Eighties.

The kindest construction on all this has been that Corbyn met this fellow in the hopes of de-escalating the Cold War by being friendly. Our Czech James Bond, likewise, would have been able to tell his masters that there were sympathetic types in Parliament —and if the word “asset” plays better on an expenses form, so much the better. He describes Corbyn now as “honest but stupid”, which is a little hurtful.

Still, what a clot. My hunch is that he was simply beguiled by the romance of it, the whiff of brimstone: of being in the know, of being the sort of person to whom “diplomats” reached out. A person of stature. A person whose views on the international scene were taken seriously abroad rather than a humdrum local MP. A player.

But it was not, at that stage, exactly hard to discover that the human rights record of the Czech regime wasn’t a perfect fit with Corbyn’s declared position. Even the young Corbyn would have known that “Prague Spring” was not a fancy brand of mineral water. He’d have known about the imprisonment of democratic reformers such as Vaclav Havel and the, ahem, chequered successes of the parent regime in Russia.

So whatever his dim view of capitalism, as a sitting MP Corbyn would have to be a knave or a fool to play footsie with even a low-grade Czech spook. It suits his political enemies to leap on the former but all evidence points to the latter. That may be more damaging.

New movie puritanism leaves little to the imagination

A new code of conduct has been drawn up for shooting sex scenes in movies: no “nudity with genitals touching”, “no use of tongues in kissing scenes” unless agreed in advance, and — boo! — no actual doing it on screen. We may all mutter and roll our eyes at the “new puritanism” but you shouldn’t need a code of conduct for most of this stuff, should you? Of course it’s bad form to stick your tongue in a colleague’s mouth unless they’ve given you the OK first. If all they’re saying is that consent is needed for intimate contact, well, duh. And if they’re saying nobody should be allowed to bump uglies on camera even if they want to, that’ll tax the imaginations of professors of ethics and liberal theorists of free will. To say nothing of pornographers.

Kylie needs our love not our scorn

Kylie Minogue tells an interviewer she was “broken” after the collapse of her relationship with Joshua Sasse last year: “My physical system was compromised. I think it’s called a nervous breakdown,” she said. Every member of my generation, which grew up with Kylie, will feel for her. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that fame and money won’t make you safe from heartbreak. But we seem to revel in fresh proof of it from our celeb sweethearts: there’s a special, unattractive sort of relish in the public unhappiness of the glam and beautiful. It’s the old kill-your-idols thing. We love them when they fly but love them more when they crash to earth.

Bots are leaving their mark on us

“Rampaging Twitter bots bred in Suffolk farmhouse,” read an eye-catching headline yesterday. This gives me hope for our rural cottage industries in the post-Brexit economy. Rampaging Twitter bots are easier to breed than giant pandas, eat less bamboo and are thrillingly au courant. Let’s breed more of them.