We don't know the whole story, and probably never will. But we do know that Vladimir Putin exhibits multiple signs of being a psychopath: smooth lyin… - John Sweeney

The results of Ceausescu's exercise in social engineering could be seen immediately after the revolution throughout the country in orphanages and hospital wards where the unwanted babies lay. The unwanted included the babies suffering from AIDS – though the regime did not recognise that Romania had an AIDS problem. This official blindness made the problem worse, disastrously so. An old medical habit – abandoned in the West long before the Second World War – had lingered in Romania. It was to inject newborn babies with blood to give them greater strength. One batch of blood contaminated with AIDS, probably in a rare aid package from the United States, was the root cause. The lack of fresh, clean needles for the injections led, through cross-infection, to an AIDS epidemic among the young. But as this too officially did not happen, nothing was done about it.

It is fair to say that the Russian secret state succeeded in getting worryingly close to serious political leaders in the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Time and again the Kremlin turned Western democracy into a game of matryoshka dolls. Lift out the Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn or Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen dolls, and you come face to face with Vladimir Putin – smirking at you.

As American and British politicians slowly began to see Putin for who he really was, Corbyn decided to echo, albeit in a faltering and weak voice, some of the Kremlin's messaging. This was because he was navigating simply by holding himself in constant opposition to American power. By doing so, he made himself yet another of the Kremlin's useful idiots. George Osborne and Peter Mandelson cosied up to Kremlin proxies for their own self-interest; Corbyn lost his bearings because his political ideology was so strong it twisted reality.