Looking at the framed copy of Charter 77 signed by Václav Havel hanging on Guido’s office wall yesterday, it occurred to to him that at the same time Jeremy Corbyn was having tea with Lt Jan Dymic, an officer of the Czech Státní bezpečnost (StB), Havel was probably enduring one of his many prison stints courtesy of the same StB service. Compare the moral character of Corbyn and Havel:

• Before being elected to political office Havel was a celebrated playwright and intellectual. As a dissident he was jailed many times and his plays were banned from being performed in Czechoslovakia.
• Before being elected to political office Corbyn was an official with the Garment Workers Union.
• Havel was once charged by the StB with being a “rabid opponent of socialism”.
• Corbyn is a rabid proponent of socialism.
• After the crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact tanks in 1968, Havel was banned from leaving the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
• Corbyn took his then girlfriend Diane Abbott on holiday to East Germany (Warsaw Pact member country) a few years after the crushing of the Prague Spring.
• In later life Havel was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award. In 1991 Havel declined a nomination for the Nobel Prize.
• Corbyn was awarded the Seán MacBride Peace Prize in 2017, named after the former IRA Director of Intelligence.

Corbyn’s cultists don’t see any problem with him meeting with StB and Stasi agents, the same people who were jailing dissidents for writing plays…