Decline and fall of the Hooray Henry

TWENTY-FIVE years on, Andrew Marr recollects the episode well but insists that it was all down to mistaken identity. They were after the Jews, he claims, and they got me as second best. Marr’s account is at any rate open to challenge. There was plenty about the future political editor of the BBC which a Cambridge University undergraduate dining club on its mettle would have found both appetising and provocative.

He affected a little goatee beard at the time. That could easily have done the trick on its own. So might his little flat cap, carefully modelled on photographs of Lenin in exile. The little denim bag he swung jauntily over his shoulders, a fashion statement on the hard Left in the late 1970s, must also be taken into account. If it displayed, as it frequently did, the latest issue of the Socialist Organiser, a Trotskyite rag, then that would have been conclusive.