Guy Adams

INVESTIGATES

SUSAN Fiona Dorinthea Michie is the granddaughter of Henry McLaren, the 2nd Baron Aberconway, an Eton-educated Edwardian industrialist and Liberal MP. He inherited major interests in coal, iron, steel and engineering conglomerates, and created the sumptuous gardens at Bodnant House, a stately home set in 5,000 acres near Snowdonia.

Her mother, Dame Anne McLaren, was born at Aberconway House, the family’s imposing 2,800- square- metre second residence in London’s Mayfair, and was one of the world’s leading biologists. When she died in 2007, aged 80, she left £52million in her will.

Ms Michie’s father, meanwhile, was an eminent computer scientist who was the son of a wealthy banker whose photo is among the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

Despite these moneyed roots, the blueblooded Susan, 62, marches to the beat of her own drum.

She stretches her every sinew in pursuance of a class war as a member of the Communist Party of Britain.

On Monday night, she addressed a meeting of about 40 true believers at the Marx Memorial Library in London’s Clerkenwell.

She delivered her speech while standing beneath a portrait of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a bronze of Lenin and an array of Soviet flags. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, this lifelong beneficiary of inherited wealth began by saying: ‘We, the working class.’

During the course of a two-hour talk, Ms Michie (whose day-job is as a university academic) made a comment that broke almost a century of hard-Left tradition. Britain’s Communist Party, she said, is urging its members to work ‘full tilt’ to help get a Labour prime minister.

This development — after decades of Communists and Labour operating on very separate lines — is a direct result of Labour’s lurch to the hard Left under Jeremy Corbyn.

Already, there have been signs of this change of policy with the Communists deciding last year not to split the Left-wing vote by fielding their own candidates at the General Election.

With the two parties increasingly in harmony (Ms Michie declared it ‘a really good situation to work much more closely than we have in the past’), the Communists — by way of a ‘priority’ — are advising their comrades to actively campaign on Corbyn’s behalf.

She told the meeting: ‘ We will be out on the doorstep, putting forward the socialist arguments, and putting those forward in the Morning Star [the Communists’ daily newspaper] wherever possible in support of a Left-led Labour Party.

‘This electoral policy is a potential springboard for strengthening organic ties with Labour.

‘Communist Party members should absolutely be involved in electoral work, and working full tilt to get Jeremy elected as leader, and the Labour Party into government.’

Ms Michie’s remarks, during a talk entitled ‘Working With Labour For A Socialist Future’, would normally have had little impact beyond the four blood-red walls of the Marx Memorial Library.

But they were recorded by the website PoliticsHome. It was also reported that she noted approvingly that ‘several comrades’ had already left the Communist Party to join Labour. And so, after years consigned to the extremist fringe of politics, they now see themselves as being on the brink of power.

All this can be seen as a classic example of ‘ entryism’ — the technique by which a well- organised group, usually with an extreme agenda, gets members to join a more mainstream political organisation — as part of a plan to subvert its policies and expand their influence.

During the 1980s, the Militant Tendency sought to take over Liverpool’s Labour Party in this fashion. Now the Communists appear to be up to something similar, but on a national level.

Intriguingly, one influential ‘ comrade’ who has switched to Labour from the Communist Party is Ms Michie’s ex-husband, the trade union official Andrew Murray. A MArxIST for four decades, he worked during the Cold War as a lobby correspondent for both the Morning Star and the Soviet news agency Novosti.

He has written in defence of Stalin — who was responsible for anything from 20 to 40million deaths — and of the despotic, totalitarian government of North Korea, with whom he has espoused a ‘ basic position of solidarity’.

He quit the Communists at the end of 2016, while working as an aide to the boss of the Unite trade union, Len McCluskey, who is Labour’s most important paymaster.

A few months later, it was announced he was to join Labour to work in Corbyn’s office, advising on ‘ strategy’ and overseeing the appointment of senior staff.

Murray is now one of the most powerful fixers in Corbyn’s inner circle.

Left-wing conviction isn’t the only thing he shares with his ex-wife, with whom he had three children.

Like a large number of Corbyn cronies, Murray comes from a background of wealth and privilege — with his own entry in Debrett’s, the encyclopaedia of the aristocracy.

The son of a stockbroker, Peter Drummond-Murray of Mastrick, and a descendant of the Earl of Perth, his mother was the daughter of a Conservative MP. Murray was educated at the £ 32,000- a- year Worth School, set in 500 acres of Sussex countryside.

His father was a member of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George (an ancient dynastic order that promotes Catholicism), and Debrett’s describes another of his honorific titles, ‘Slains Pursuivant of Arms’, as one of Scotland’s most coveted heraldic offices.

Not that this worries supporters of Corbyn. Mischievous talk of posh genealogy is as much of an irrelevance as complaints about ‘entryism’ (which they regard as democracy in action).

Of course, many are probably unaware of Murray’s background. He mysteriously dropped his doublebarrelled name.

Corbynistas would undoubtedly argue that since the party is intent on taxing the rich much more, having wealthy party activists such as Murray and Ms Michie on board shows that its activists are happy to sacrifice their own money in the cause of wealth redistribution. Such arguments, though, meet with short shrift among Labour centrists. THEY point out that Corbyn’s inner circle is dominated by privately wealthy Marxists. They include spokesman Seumas Milne ( the Winchester and Oxfordeducated son of a former BBC directorgeneral), Press aide James Schneider (a financier’s son, also Winchester and Oxford, who grew up in a £7million mansion in Primrose Hill) and Jon Lansman, an alumnus of fee-paying Highgate School, whose seriously well- off father was a property entrepreneur and Conservative councillor, and who now runs the powerful pressure group Momentum.

Money provides this posh cadre with personal security that millions of traditional Labour supporters can only dream of. They are unlikely to be affected too badly if their leader becomes PM and introduces a new ‘wealth tax’ and wreaks havoc on the country’s economy.

Michael Dugher, the Blairite former Labour MP, responded to this week’s Communist Party endorsement of Corbyn by observing on Twitter: ‘The posher you are, the more hard Left you can afford to be.

‘ Ever thus has been the case. Murray, Milne, Schneider, Corbyn himself — all posh boys. real working class people can’t afford this b******s.’ (The inclusion of Corbyn is a reference that he went, for a time, to a private school in Shropshire, where annual fees today are £8,850.)

As it happens, hard-pressed working-class people are also unable to afford multi-million-pound homes that can be passed to their children in what is euphemistically called a ‘tax-efficient manner’.

Not so much Susan ‘We, the working class’ Michie!

For it emerged last year that two of her children with Murray had been granted ownership of her former home on a north London street where houses are valued at upwards of £2million.

The property appears to have first been divided into two. One half was transferred to a son in 2010, when, according to Land registry records, it was valued at £450,000.

The other portion of the property, consisting of the main part of the house, was signed over in 2014 to her daughter, who was then working as political adviser to Corbyn’s shadow minister Grahame Morris. At the time, it was worth £1.3million.

For her part, Ms Michie moved in 2009 to a smaller house, several