Guido just had a chance to interrogate Seumas as to how long he was posing a security risk without his pass yesterday. Seumas merely responded “here is my pass, I am wearing my pass” and held it up to the huddle of hacks gathered round him after PMQs. Guido pressed and asked how many hours was he without it yesterday and only responded “no comment”. The exchange ended by Seumas saying “in the words of President Trump, all is well.” Guido thought he detected a slight odor…

On the fourth floor of the Norman Shaw North building a Guido co-conspirator found this pass. Guido wonders exactly what is was that Seumas was doing in the toilet that necessitated him removing his pass and lanyard. What sort of motion was involved? In any event, after some thought, the pass has been handed in to the pass office…

He looks a bit flushed…

The BBC have previewed details of their Panorama exposé on Labour anti-Semitism ahead of its broadcast tonight. The Labour whistleblowers are accusing two of Corbyn’s closest allies of interfering in Labour’s disciplinary processes around anti-Semitism – Labour General Secretary Jennie Formby and Corbyn’s right-hand man Seumas Milne. Helps to explain why the Labour response has been quite so aggressive in this particular case…

The Leader’s Office is accused of being “angry and obstructive” over anti-Semitism amidst numerous other allegations including Formby bringing in officials who “overruled” and “downgraded” disciplinary decisions, while deleting emails and using external email addresses to try to cover her tracks, and Corbyn’s office taking in various cases for his own aides to process them directly. Labour are sticking to the line that these are false allegations from “disaffected” former members of staff. Doesn’t look good…

Seumas Milne is no stranger to defending the UK’s enemies, whether it’s Vladimir Putin’s novichok exploits or Bashir al-Assad and North Korea. Now a fresh video has been unearthed by tireless investigator Iggy Ostanin of Corbyn’s spin doctor defending the “right to resist” of a notorious Iraqi insurgent group responsible for beheading civilians. Pick a conflict, any conflict, you can almost guarantee Corbyn and Seumas will side with the wrong ‘uns…

In the 2007 video Milne describes how he “interviewed three leaders of three of the main Iraqi resistance groups earlier this summer” – by his own account this included al-Rahman al-Zubeidy, spokesman for the Ansar al-Sunna group. In 2004, Ansar al-Sunna murdered twelve Nepalese workers they took hostage, including broadcasting a beheading online, justifying it with:

“We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians … believing in Buddha as their God.”

Ansar al-Sunna also claimed responsibility for numerous suicide bombings across Iraq with hundreds of local civilian casualties, they were already a proscribed terrorist organisation by the UK two years before Milne met them. The Home Office called them:

“a fundamentalist Sunni Islamist extremist group…[which] aims to expel all foreign influences from Iraq and create a fundamentalist Islamic state.”

Now they’ve merged with ISIS…

Milne was clearly not ignorant of Ansar al-Sunna’s brutal activities, in his own Guardian article he euphemistically labels them an “Islamist armed group with a ferocious reputation in Iraq”. Despite this, he defended them in his speech to the Stop the War Coalition, claiming it was a “myth” that the insurgent groups were focused on killing civilians and concluding that “it is important that I think we support their right to resist” and “we need to make sure that their voices are heard outside the country”. With Seumas doing their PR they hardly needed anyone else…