On October 7, Vladimir Putin celebrated his sixty-third birthday. To commemorate this occasion, we’ve spent the last few days here at Useful Stooges looking at Putin – and at a few of his benighted fans around the world. Today: Britain’s new Labour Party leader.

There’s a lot that can be said about Jeremy Corbyn, the politician from Islington whose recent ascent to the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party has sparked (to put it mildly) immense controversy. After his election to the top post on September 12, he proudly belted out “The Red Flag” – a dusty old Commie tune, long popular among politically active and revolutionary-minded workers, that Tony Blair and New Labour tried to shelve back in the 1990s because of its radical-left associations – but, attending a Battle of Britain memorial service shortly after his election, Corbyn famously refused to sing “God Save the Queen.” The Economist, in a commentary headlined “Backwards, comrades!”, called his rise to power “a grave misfortune” for Britain; Michael Gove, Britain’s Secretary of State for Justice, wrote that if Corbyn were to become Prime Minister, it would represent “a direct threat to the security of our country, the security of our economy and the security of every family….The country would face economic chaos.”

That’s not all. He’s also a big Putin fan. An August 12 headline at the International Business Times website didn’t pull punches: “Is Jeremy Corbyn Putin’s latest ‘useful idiot’ in Europe?” Reporter Tom Porter noted that Corbyn, writing in March 2014, had “oppose[d] providing Ukraine with military support in the wake of the Maidan revolution, and echoe[d] Russian claims that it was Nato scheming that lay at the heart of the crisis.” In comments that might have been written by Putin himself, Corbyn complained that Ukraine had been “put under enormous pressure to come into the EU and Nato military orbit” and sought to paint the Maidan revolution as “far-right and racist.” Instead of acknowledging Putin’s own saber-rattling, Corbyn acted as if NATO was the aggressor: “Nato has sought to expand since the end of the Cold War. It has increased its military capability and expenditure. It operates way beyond its original 1948 area and its attempt to encircle Russia is one of the big threats of our time.”

“To any viewers of Kremlin-owned news and propaganda outlet Russia Today (RT),” observed Porter dryly, “these views will be familiar.” Indeed, as Porter pointed out, “Corbyn has appeared as a guest on RT, and in a tweet urged followers to watch the station, arguing it provides a more ‘objective’ coverage of world affairs than Western media.” A few days before Porter’s column came out, Anne Applebaum, the brilliant historian of Soviet Communism and author of the sobering and meticulous Gulag: A History, said straight-out that Corbyn is a useful idiot, “one of many on the European far-left as well as the far-right who appears to have swallowed wholesale Russia’s lie that war in Ukraine has been created by Nato, rather than by the ‘separatists’ who have invaded eastern Ukraine and are paid, trained and organised by Russia itself.”

Journalist James Bloodworth agreed, describing Corbyn as “remarkably good at proffering apologetics for dictatorship and tyranny,” including that of Vladimir Putin. Writing in the Telegraph, also in August, political editor Michael Wilkinson and Russia correspondent Roland Oliphant quoted Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, who is “considered very close to the Russian foreign ministry,” as saying that “Russia would certainly be pleased to see [Corbyn] as the head of either major party.”

Indeed, after Corbyn’s election, this remarkable sentence appeared in the Huffington Post: “The Russian embassy has given Jeremy Corbyn its support amid the Conservative Party attacking the new Labour leader over being a threat to national security.” Does one laugh or cry?