Send Joyce to the gulag

The Telegraph today reports on the allegation, first raised in yesterday’s Mail, that senior Labour party figures conspired to smear the new Chief of the General Staff, Sir David Richards, on the ground that his daughter works as an aide to David Cameron.

According to the Telegraph, the proposed campaign against General Richards was one of the principal reasons for Eric Joyce’s resignation last week as PPS to Bob Ainsworth, the woefully inept Defence Secretary.

“So what’s new?” one might wonder.  We know that at least one Labour minister was suspected of plotting a smear campaign against General Richards’s predecessor, Sir Richard Dannatt.  To smear General Richards would simply be business as usual.

Well, what is new is the reaction of Kevan Jones, the junior defence minister  who has been fingered by various bloggers, including Guido, as the instigator of the plot against General Dannatt.  Jones has denied the accusation and, since Ainsworth lacks sufficient leadership to hold an inquiry into the issue, we must naturally accept his word.

However, Jones’s response to the latest allegation is, frankly, disgraceful.  This is how the Telegraph reports it:

Mr Jones insisted that he had never been present at a meeting attended by Mr Joyce at which Sir David’s daughter was discussed and denied any smear campaign.

“Unfortunately Eric Joyce is getting into the realms of fantasy now, he has clearly had a lot of stress after his resignation,” he said.

“The only meetings (in the MoD) that he attended that I am aware of were political meetings and at none of them was it ever discussed about smearing anybody.”

The suggestion, clearly, is that Joyce, a former serving army officer, is so incapable of handling the little emotional upset of his resignation that he has become delusional.

Attributing mental illness to political dissidents was, of course, a textbook technique of the regime in the former Soviet Union.  It is distressing to see that it has now apparently been adopted by the British Labour party.