We came close to losing our democracy in 1979

Douglas Eden reveals the extraordinary penetration of the 1970s Labour movement by pro-Soviet trade unionists and the extent of Callaghan’s toleration of the hard Left

Thirtieth anniversaries have been in vogue this year. So far, there have been seminars and conferences to commemorate the notorious 1979 Winter of Discontent and the subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Still missing is observance of the defeat of the Left’s project, led from the trade unions, to transfigure parliamentary demo-cracy into a form of soviet state.

The project’s leading figure was the general secretary of Britain’s largest union, the Transport & General Workers Union (the T&G), and chairman of the TUC’s international committee, Jack Jones. In 1977, more than half the respondents to a Gallup poll named him the most powerful man in Britain. Only half as many named the Prime Minister, James Callaghan.

Jones died only a few weeks ago at the age of 96 and, after a series of anodyne obituaries not speaking ill of the dead, the brief moratorium on his reputation was suitably ended by one of his KGB case officers, Oleg Gordievsky CMG, the best-known surviving KGB defector to our side.