The charge sheet against Milne goes as follows: that, as Oxford student, he stayed in Beirut at the height of the civil war in 1977 with an array of leftist Palestinian militants; that on a trip to Jerusalem with Corbyn, he met two members of Hamas on a trip paid for by MEMO, a UK organisation promoting the Palestinian cause; that soon after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Milne chaired a meeting in Sochi addressed by Vladimir Putin, all expenses paid by the Russians.
Let me deal with this in reverse order. The meeting Milne chaired was organised by the Valdai International Discussion Club. This is a group of about 40 specialists on Russia; journalists, academics, and analysts who meet Putin once a year.
Milne was in good company - the New York Times, the Economist, the FT, the Times, Brookings Institution were regulars, for different reasons.
For the journalists it was access. For the US analysts, it was intelligence. The media had different policies on whether to accept the lavish hospitality. The NYT and FT insisted on paying for the trip themselves. The other media, including The Guardian, were less fastidious.
The only reason Milne was invited as a journalist from The Guardian was because I had dropped out. It was when I heard Putin repeating the same lines he used the year before that I decided enough was enough. Milne was initially invited to Sochi as a speaker, although he found when he got there that he was chairing a meeting - a common enough occurrence with these gigs.
The fuss in The Guardian was initially about him going to Sochi after Russia was considered beyond the pale following its take over of parts of Ukraine. Milne was phoned up by Jonathan Freedland as his plane was on the tarmac, although the trip had already been signed off by the company's foreign travel system in which you had to declare where you were going and who was paying. Curiously, no such attention had been paid to Timothy Garton Ash's expenses-paid trips because they had been paid by governments considered allies.
However this list of organisations hobnobbing with Putin is not exhaustive. I have a little bit of intelligence for Dearlove and the Mail on Sunday about whom else attended Valdai, and "hobnobbed with Putin".
It is someone of whom Dearlove cannot be unaware: his successor at MI6, and the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir John Scarlett. I had a drink with the man. Scarlett travelled on a new UK passport, scrubbed clean for the visit.
Scarlett’s meeting with Putin took place in a bizarre setting, accurately described by fellow Valdai members Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, who co-authored a biography of the Russian president.
Hill, who is another Brit, sat next to Putin in 2010 and today she is Donald Trump’s chief Russia adviser and regarded as a restraining influence. Presumably, Hill is not regarded by MI6 as a security threat, although she was a serial hobnobber with Putin.
The encounter between Putin and Scarlett took place at an old Soviet dairy turned into an equestrian centre for Russia’s new elite, in the discrete setting of the woods outside Moscow. Putin had tired of presenting himself to us at official venues and wanted to display himself as a representative of New Russia - rich, confident and in your face.
The stage setting, a wooden hunting lodge, turned out to be just another elaborate piece of presidential theatre. We found out it had been rebuilt just for this meal.
There were about 40 of us seated on a long trestle table that formed a large square. Putin sat about seven place settings along from me. We noticed that his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, passed two notes, which his boss slipped into his top pocket, during a question and answer session that lasted over two and a half hours.
On one of them, Peskov alerted his boss to the presence of Scarlett sitting opposite in the extreme left hand corner of the square. The former KGB man wanted to make a point of welcoming MI6 to his elite table. True to tradition, the meeting of the two spymasters went off the rails.
Peskov told Putin that Scarlett was the one wearing the red poppy. The problem was that the meeting fell on the anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of the First World War, and a number of Brits attending the dinner were wearing poppies.
So Putin, who is short sighted but too vain to wear contact lenses, alighted on Anatol Lieven, a UK academic, and accorded him the honour of running MI6 from 2004 to 2009. Lieven was confused when Putin referred to him as a "former colleague".
Dearlove cannot have erased this from his memory. Nor can he have forgotten how he, Dearlove, arranged for his boss Tony Blair to endorse Putin when he was just prime minister. He once admitted regretting having arranged for Blair to meet Putin in Saint Petersburg.
So Milne shaking hands with Putin is treason. But MI6’s Scarlett doing the same is not?
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