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.

He confirmed in April that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent. ‘I was his last case officer,’ wrote Gordievsky (Daily Telegraph, 28 April), ‘meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham [six years after Jones’s retirement from the T&G], together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s. I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981, I had had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1986, when they were passed on to the archive.’

The idea that Jack Jones had a close collaborative relationship with the Soviet side in the Cold War will surprise and perhaps alarm many who recall how influential he was in British politics during his prime.