New Labour’s secret IRA fan? He is not as rare as you’d think...

APROMINENT New Labour journalist, Roy Greenslade, has finally admitted he is a lifelong supporter of IRA violence. You should care, even though you may think Mr Greenslade is obscure and unimportant.

For it is yet another of those lightning-flashes which reveal something I have been trying to tell you for years and which you do not want to believe. New Labour, whose ideas have now captured the Tory Party too, is a revolutionary party, rooted in Marxism and loathing of Britain as it used to be.

I’ll be back to that. But first, Mr Greenslade. He is a close friend of Alastair Campbell, the ruthless bullying commissar, elected to nothing by anybody, who was given unheard-of ministerial powers when New Labour entered Downing Street. This was the first vital step of Blair’s constitutional revolution. But Mr Campbell doesn’t like talking about his old pal Roy.

They were mates when they both worked for the lying monster and thief Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror. But in the early years of Blair’s government, Mr Greenslade patrolled the media on behalf of his friend, using the Left-wing Guardian as a platform from which to attack journalists and newspapers – including The Mail on Sunday – which criticised the Blair/Campbell government.

In a giveaway to anyone not besotted with the idiotic but widespread idea that the Blair creature is a conservative, Mr Greenslade once proclaimed himself to be ‘like many former Marxists, an unashamed admirer of Tony Blair’.

Why would that be? Because trained revolutionaries could see, as the public could not, what Blair was really up to. Long after it could do Blair no harm with voters, he admitted to having been a Trotskyist at Oxford, though he did not say which organisation he belonged to.

An astonishing number of Blair’s senior Ministers are known to have been ‘former’ Marxists, from the Communist Party or its offshoots – from the Militant Tendency or from a body called the International Marxist Group (IMG).

I am pretty sure several others had similar pasts, of which we know nothing.

I remember the IMG well. In my student Leftist years, I recall being disgusted to hear IMG members shouting ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on demonstrations. I was a revolutionary in those days, but even so I balked at supporting murderers and gangsters such as the Provisional IRA were and still are.

The IMG also encouraged its members in a tactic called ‘entryism’ – joining the Labour Party so as to infiltrate it and take it over. This was quite easy in the 1970s when Labour’s old membership was dying on its feet and many London local Labour parties were there for the taking.

Support for the IRA in such places was strong and shameless, and I got myself shouted down more than once for speaking against it in the then Hampstead Labour Party.

If you think such ideas vanished from the minds of those involved, or were confined to a few Corbynites, you are very much mistaken. The IMG entryists did not stop being ultra-radicals as they slithered upwards in their nice careers and in the Labour machine – they just got smoother and slicker about how they went about it.

Mr Greenslade is actually more honest than the others, but that’s not a compliment to him.