Corbyn reviews ‘Comrade Corbyn’

AS soon as Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly became Labour Party leader last year, the race was on among our big name political journalists to get a book out. There’s a winners paddock ribbon and rosette, then, for the Telegraph’s Rosa Prince, whose speedy to the shelves Comrade Corbyn is celebrated this week as ‘fascinating and forensic’, as well as ‘meticulously researched and always even-handed’ by Mary Riddell of… the Daily Telegraph.

In the book, Prince makes great note of Corbyn’s unusual politeness in the cut-throat world of politics, but such good temper does not seem to extend to her work. Just a fortnight after it hit bookshops, the Labour leader claims he has found 14 inaccuracies in the first eight pages of her book.

“Dates, places, names, people, all things that could have been checked if the research had been done properly,” Corbyn told the Islington Tribune, as if going out of his way to contradict Riddell’s review. “I don’t know what Rosa Prince was trying to achieve in this book, apart from writing something very quickly without researching it properly, and also trying to persuade people that I really wanted tis book written by her when that has never been the case.”