Jeremy Corbyn got his own back on Tony Blair last night in the only sensible way, by calling for him to be tried for war crimes:

“If he’s committed a war crime, yes. I think it was an illegal war, I’m confident about that… and therefore he has to explain to that. Is he going to be tried for it? I don’t know. Possibly. I want to see all those that committed war crimes tried for it.”

Except Corbyn hasn’t always taken such a principled line.

This is the extraordinary Early Day Motion that he signed in 2004, playing down events in Kosovo and spinning for the brutal Milosevic regime:

“That this House welcomes John Pilger’s column for the New Statesman issue of 13th December, reminding readers of the devastating human cost of the so-termed ‘humanitarian’ invasion of Kosovo, led by NATO and the United States in the Spring of 1999, without any sanction of the United Nations Security Council; congratulates John Pilger on his expose of the fraudulent justifications for intervening in a ‘genocide’ that never really existed in Kosovo; recalls President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed, entirely without foundation, that ‘we’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing…..they may have been murdered’ and that David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced with equal inaccuracy that as many as ‘225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59’ may have been killed; recalls that the leader of a Spanish forensic team sent to Kosovo returned home, complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of ‘a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one mass grave’; further recalls that one year later, the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body de facto set up by NATO, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo’s ‘mass graves’ was 2,788; believes the pollution impact of the bombing of Kosovo is still emerging, including the impact of the use of depleted uranium munitions; and calls on the Government to provide full assistance in the clean up of Kosovo.”

Not to mention cuddly Jez’s speech to a Trotskyite group praising the Gaddafi regime, recounted by one attendee:

“the speech was not so much anti-war, which would have been perfectly reasonable considering talk at the time of Nato intervention, as pro that country’s dictator, Colonel Gaddafi… audible groans filled enlightened corners of the hall, including my own, when the left-winger began to reel off what he considered the “achievements” of the Gaddafi regime”

“I want to see all those that committed war crimes tried for it,” so long as they are former Labour Prime Ministers…