After weeks of hysteria in Britain’s right-wing press, the latest smear campaign against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has fallen apart in the most humiliating fashion. Allegations that Corbyn was a Czech spy gave way to shrill demands that he release a Stasi file which doesn’t exist before both collapsed into abject apologies from Tory members of parliament who fear a brush with the libel courts.

But like a cuttle-fish squirting ink to obscure its retreat, pundits have tried to shift the conversation onto more promising ground. Corbyn may not have been on the Czech payroll, they insist, but his supposed record of complicity with the Eastern Bloc is shameful enough in its own right, and should disqualify him from high office.

In a Times article with the headline “Jeremy Corbyn’s sickening support of Soviet empire,” Edward Lucas completely neglects to provide any evidence of that “support,” but works himself into a lather of indignation all the same: “His open, visceral anti-Westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”