How my party was betrayed by KGB boot-lickers

7 November 2009

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force.

That evening Kubeikin escorted me to a ballet performance at the Bolshoi theatre and in the foyer I followed, successfully, the advice of the ambassador. The ballet being performed that night was Shostakovich’s The Age of Gold.

Kinnock succeeded Foot as leader after the 1983 defeat. When Labour was slaughtered in the 1987 election on the same doomed policies of unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the European Union, Kinnock put me in charge of changing Labour’s foreign policy. I went to both Washington and Moscow; in Moscow the Soviet leadership told me that Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons was not a matter of the tiniest interest to them, one way or the other. My policy document junked the unilateralist policy, to achieve which I successfully persuaded both the NEC and the Labour conference.

This all became irrelevant after Tony Blair succeeded to the leadership, since he had no sentimental feelings whatever about the Labour party, losing as little time as possible in downgrading both the NEC and the conference to impotent onlookers and ending any subservience to Moscow in Britain’s foreign policy. He would probably, though, have admired Kubeikin’s natty tailoring.