‘Seumas Milne must be stopped’

Romans and Britons alike lend me your ears. In Westminster there are many open secrets, some the public know and others they are not privy to. But for those of us that see Black Rod or Dennis Skinner roll steadily through the corridors of power, we see, we watch but we say nothing: the veil of omertà hangs heavily over parliament.

What I am about to reveal today is not going to make me any friends, not that I have many to begin with, and I will be viewed with suspicion, a lone whistleblower standing up for what is right and fortuitously most advantageous to my cause. I am tired of not saying what must be said, and of knowing what must be known. For legal reasons I am not going to say Seumas Milne is a Russian asset, but I am going to present the evidence for this claim informed by my lived experience and the electoral interests of the party I lead.

Becoming the first MP to be born in the 1980s was a whirlwind; on entering the House of Commons for the first time I could scarcely believe my eyes. Finally I was here in the Gothic building I had dreamed of sitting in ever since I’d seen dear old Maggie stride in time and time again to put the socialists and trade unionists to the sword. But this naive wonderment did not last very long and soon I saw a man sitting on an old chair in the hallowed hallways, pen and paper in hand, his legs crossed in such a contorted manner he looked like a coiled spring ready to pop.

“Watch out for that one,” said Ming Campbell. I looked up to him, partly because he was taller than me but also due to his wisdom and erudition. He went on to tell me that the man in front of us was Seumas Milne, a young (everyone is young to Ming) journalist with a keen eye, a penchant for vodka and links to the KGB. His friend Richard Gott had left this very newspaper having been denounced as a Soviet agent of influence, yet how Milne managed to get away with it, nobody really knew.

It is times like this when an old Russian phrase comes to mind, it goes: “Seumas Milne is a Russian spy”.

It is times like this when an old Russian phrase comes to mind, it goes: “Seumas Milne is a Russian spy”. Eerily portentous for our times, don’t you think? “The Thin Controller”, as he was dubbed during his time at The Guardian, is famous for his defence of Communism, he can often be heard muttering to himself “Mensheviks, Mensheviks, Goddamn Mensheviks” as he goes about his working day, an apparatchik eternally haunted by the internecine conflicts that socialism always results in. It is said that there is a park bench he favours where he is regularly seen spooling tape into a rock, and as he sits with Corbyn he often has a newspaper spread wide with two eye holes punched through it.

Can we really let someone like Milne, who often tries to cover up or dismiss the atrocities that Communism has wrought on the populace, walk the corridors of Westminster any longer? Can we really let him drip poisonous ideas such as worker owned industries or a fully funded NHS into the ears of young PLP members? Even the Conservative policies are better and I should know because I wrote half of them but let us not dwell on that. Our focus must surely be on the malign Milne and to him I say this: stop apologising for Putin, stop your wild Siberian vodka parties and grow up.

● Jo Swinson is the leader of the Liberal Democrats party