Corbynista Barry Gardiner has been busy bashing the mainstream media for dealing in ‘fake news’ and spin. But it looks like Barry knows a thing or too about faking-up some positive coverage. The Amazon page for his wife Caroline Smith’s book Thistles of the Hesperides carries a review posted by “gardsmithcb@aol.com“. The unnamed reviewer’s take on the poetry collection heaps praise on Mrs Barry Gardiner:

“Why can’t more poets write like Caroline Smith? There is strength and intelligence in every word. I heard her talk about this book on BBC Radio 3 and she just hooked me. It is about the grinding reality of life on a Scottish council housing estate where she lived. Yet she transforms it, making it beautiful, funny, uplifting and tragically moving in turn by interweaving the mythical stories of ancient Greece. The fit is astounding. This is writing that is passionate and politically committed as well as deeply personal: but personal in a way that reveals to us our own humanity. Think Douglas Dunn at his best or Seamus Heaney, but with the long narrative eye of Browning.”

Clicking through to “gardsmithcb@aol.com“‘s profile reveals a wishlist in the name of “Barry Gardiner”, who is based “just south of Watford” (Gardiner’s constituency is Brent North). Did Barry compare his wife and office manager to the Nobel Prize for Literature winning Seamus Heaney? Labour’s fake news basher giving a fake review to his wife…