It’s not the Trots you need to worry about

How strange it is that an obscure Tsarist prison warder in Odessa is commemorated forever in thousands of tiny, irritable revolutionary sects. But that is who the real Trotsky was, and that is all we know about him. The future leader of the 1917 Petrograd putsch, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, hurriedly scribbled his former jailer’s name in a false passport as he fled from Siberian exile in 1902, hidden in a haywain. He later complained that he had no idea he would be stuck with being ‘Trotsky’ for the rest of his life. But would this enduring movement, as persistent in the world as the measles, have survived so long under its founder’s real name? I doubt it. There is something about the word ‘Trotskyist’ — energetic, slightly crazy, inherently funny and melodramatic, that gives the brand its enduring power.

Even now, Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson is making our flesh creep with allegations of Trotskyist wickedness among Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. He doesn’t know the half of it. But I beg him — and you — not to worry. Trotskyists can be guaranteed to sink, burn and destroy each other, if left alone, and are too boring, self-obsessed, incompetent and internecine to do anyone any serious harm except themselves. The danger comes from elsewhere.

I write as an ex-Trotskyist, or ‘ex-Trot’, who — despite nowadays preferring Edmund Burke to Lenin — is marked for life by fun and games, and a certain amount of spite as well, among the comrades in the sunny days of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

All I ask is that you call me an ex-Trotskyist, a technical description, not an ex-Trotskyite, a term of abuse employed by Stalinists. Because, you see, this is a world of linguistic niceties that would keep Noam Chomsky happy for years.