Forty Years On

Our overseas aid budget has unsurprisingly come to the attention of The Greediest Man In The World, who made himself a billionaire by lying his country into war and who has since blithely admitted that lucrative deceit on television.

But today also brings news of the advocacy of entryism in an Oxford student newspaper called Isis by its then political editor, one Christopher Huhne. Huhne was at that time in the same year and at the same college as one Anthony Blair. Huhne was also an active member of the International Marxist Group. As was a Rhodes Scholar reading PPE at that same college, Saint John's, namely Geoff Gallop, a subsequent Premier of his native Western Australia. Even then, Gallop was the political mentor to Blair, whose groomsman he went on to be. His son is Blair's godson, putting Gallop the Elder on par with his erstwhile compatriot, Rupert Murdoch.

Huhne, as we know, went on, via the SDP, to the Liberal Democrats and thus to his present Cabinet position. The SDP is the least toxic of the three streams flowing into our present Political Class. But it is still very badly contaminated. Apparently unable to see that the trade unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, it was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Blair without the rate for the job.

It had betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed Christian Socialism (and, as is rarely realised, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, and carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration. Faced with Bennism and Trotskyism on one side, and with the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, it advocated exactly the wrong thing, "more, not less, radical change in our society". Alliance with the Liberal Party committed the SDP to constitutional agenda scarcely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, many of which have now been enacted and most of which are now the policy of all three parties.

And these streams are by no means entirely distinct. For example, the only British Minister ever known to have been an agent of the Soviet Bloc (specifically, of Czechoslovakia) was John Stonehouse, the Labour MP most closely associated with the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs in the days when it was still trying to persuade both main parties, and later the only MP ever to have sat in the English separatist interest, before, having left Parliament, he joined the SDP. In Stonehouse, the three toxic streams met. He cannot have been the only one. He was not. And he is not.

Take, for example, Chris Huhne. We know about both the IMG and the SDP. Might there yet be more to discover about his ties, presumably motivated by the IMG's strongly anti-Soviet stance, to the Far Right? Such are the Trotskyist roots of neoconservatism the Western world over.