So just who could she be talking about?
SEUMAS MILNE
A COMMUNIST sympathiser from his school days, Seumas Milne attended communist meetings at Oxford University and – after graduating – took a job at the newspaper Straight Left, which represented the Stalinist faction of the Communist Party Of Great Britain.
He joined The Guardian in 1984, becoming labour correspondent, and later defended the newspaper’s literary editor Richard Gott after he confessed to meeting officials from the KGB and taking money from a Soviet spy. Mr Milne said that the allegations ‘seemed absurd’. He joined Jeremy Corbyn’s team as director of communications in 2015.
JON LANSMAN
HARD-Left veteran Jon Lansman founded the Momentum grassroots campaign group, which did so much to propel Mr Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015.
He is a central member of Mr Corbyn’s inner circle and a decades-long ally of John McDonnell.
He joined Labour in the 1970s and went on to work for Tony Benn during the bitter factionalism of the early 1980s. Last year he said: ‘I’ve never been in any Trotskyist organisations, or far left groups. I’ve always been a Bennite.’
ANDREW MURRAY
NOW chief of staff at the Unite union, Andrew Murray – who was seconded to Labour’s election campaign – spent decades as a leading figure in the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain.
He was a former correspondent for hard-Left bible The Morning Star and Soviet news agency Novosti, and wrote an article on the 120th anniversary of Stalin’s birth, questioning why the tyrant was so hated.