dirty, seamy reality. It wasn’t a matter of morality or some special virtue on my part. It was as if everything I believed in was proved, in one revealing second, to be false, lies. I, my husband, my children, my comrades had sacrificed so much, had worked so hard for this … animal.
At the next meeting of the central committee, Healy duly denounced her for political crimes. When a friend interceded, he was beaten. Healy enjoyed the beatings. Party members who crossed him described how he would hit them while his goons held them down. When he had finished, he would stand back and savour his victims’ pain. ‘It’s Christmas,’ he would gloat as he rubbed his hands together.
It was only a matter of time before Gerry Healy and Saddam Hussein became friends.
The party always had money, and it did not all come from its weary members. The WRP ran a head office and flats in Clapham, regional offices and Corin Redgrave’s Derbyshire mansion. It also produced a daily newspaper News Line – a Herculean undertaking and a constant drain on resources for a small group of Trotskyists. Healy kept insolvency at bay by soliciting funds from the Arab tyrants of twenty-five years ago. Dictatorial regimes will reward any group that supports their cause unequivocally, however obscure it may be, because they want to be able to show their subject peoples that foreigners beyond the reach of their security services freely choose to flatter them. Lucrative printing contracts arrived at the News Line offices. Perhaps because they in turn wanted to show what they could do for their new friends, the party’s propagandists descended into the fascist conspiracy theory that the Jews controlled Britain.
‘A powerful Zionist connection runs from the so called Left of the Labour Party right into the centre of Thatcher’s government in Downing Street,’ News Line told its readers. ‘Top of the list we have Mr Stuart Young, a director of the Jewish Chronicle, as youngest-ever chairman of the BBC … He is the brother of Mr David Young, another Thatcher appointee, who is chairman of the Manpower Services Commission.’
Jews controlled the Labour Party, the Conservative Party … every party except the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. They were everywhere.
Charlie Pottins joined News Line as a young journalist in 1976 and later described its subservience to Saddam. ‘To my shame, I accepted a report that the Baathist regime was conceding autonomy to the Kurds, but I was shocked when Healy denied the Kurds were a nation entitled to rights.’
Pottins was fired, but he continued to hear more about the strange relationship between the dictator of a large country and the dictator of a tiny party.
Hostilities between Iraqi intelligence services and the PLO put the News Line in a spot, as did the later outbreak of war between Iraq and Iran, but, when Saddam Hussein was attacking his own people, Healy had no problem deciding whom to support. This one-time ‘revolutionary’ had enjoyed VIP treatment and a motorcycle escort on his trip to Baghdad! The WRP came up with excuses for the execution of Iraqi Communist Party members, even calling a mass meeting to back the Iraqi regime. But that was not all. News Line photographers took pictures of a student demonstration outside the Iraqi embassy, probably assuming it was just a normal reporting task. But, when Healy asked them to make blow-ups to deliver to the embassy, one at least had the temerity to refuse, and she quit.
A debased part of the British left was spying on the left-wing Iraqi exiles whose stories Kanan Makiya was collecting. Typical of the propaganda the WRP put out was a special issue of News Line in 1980 entitled Iraq Under Leadership of the Arab Baath Party. Its journalist gazed with awe at the plans for the Baghdad Saddam wanted to create – possibly from the designs of Makiya Associates. The Baath building boom was a sign of a ‘great march forward,’ he cried. Baath propagandists assured him the march would take Iraqis to a new form of society that would see ‘the elimination of all forms of exploitation’.
The WRP blew apart in October 1985 when a delighted Fleet Street broke the sensational news of the ‘Reds in the Bed’ scandal. The papers revealed that Healy was not only a paranoid bully and megalomaniac but a rapist near as dammit. Kate Blakeney was not the only object of his unwelcome attentions. Twenty-six women members accused him of ‘cruel and systematic debauchery’ on party premises. One of them was the daughter of two of Healy’s oldest friends. She told how he had rewarded her parents’ loyalty by sleeping with her and beating her. She had been hurt so often she was close to being a cripple. Many more women came forward. The Sunday Mirror described how Healy’s seduction technique included chat-up lines Leon Trotsky would have recognized. ‘He would throw his arms around women and tell them to submit. If they protested – and some of them did – he would say, “You are doing this for the party and I AM THE PARTY”.’
As his rivals moved against him, Healy took off with as many documents as he could grab. One he left behind showed that the WRP had taken about £20,000 from Iraq.
Unabashed by the revelations, about 150 members of the WRP stuck by Healy and formed an even tinier party for him to lead. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were among them. Like Cordelia and the Fool, they stayed with their Lear to the end, dismissing the abuse of women and the money from dictatorships as the black propaganda of MI5. When he died in 1990, their funeral orations predicted that one day he would be recognized as a great thinker.
As an example of how the Left is not a happy family of decent people, the story of the WRP is hard to beat. Dostoevsky said that revolutionaries were attracted to causes that gave them ‘the right to dishonour’ under the cover of high-sounding ideals, and Healy certainly enjoyed the pretext to dishonour women revolutionary socialism gave him. Despite communism, people still need reminding that the far left can be just as thuggish and perverted as the far right. As I said above, the tale is also an example of how the far left can be more cultish than the worst religious sects – like the Moonies, but without the smiles.
Looking back, what is interesting is not that Healy chose to go along with totalitarianism – there were plenty of fellow travellers in Western democracies in the twentieth century – but the nature of the Iraqi regime he chose to follow. He had very few other options because Trotskyists were the loneliest of political animals in the twentieth century. They couldn’t tolerate Western democracy, but they couldn’t become the fellow travellers of the communist tyrannies because all the communist regimes and parties accepted the legacy of Stalin, Trotsky’s enemy, to varying degrees. Healy had to look elsewhere and ended up with Saddam Hussein for want of better. The totalitarianism of the Baathist ultra-right was preferable to the real enemy – the liberal version of democracy that permitted him to organize a party and argue his case. His choice anticipated the choices of the twenty-first century. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, hardly any communist tyrannies survived. When people wanted to go from justifiable democratic opposition into fellow travelling with totalitarianism, what else was there to travel with other than the regimes and movements of the ultra-right?
I write this with the benefit of hindsight. In 1985, the collapse of the WRP didn’t seem significant to me or anyone else. It delighted the newspapers, but if the Redgraves had not brought their celebrity to the party, few journalists would have been interested. Everyone else on the Left of the day thought the WRP was a party of nutcases. An exception was Ken Livingstone, the future Mayor of London. At Healy’s funeral, he praised the quality of News Line’s journalism and said that Healy was a victim rather than a victimizer. ‘I haven’t the slightest doubt that the upheavals that split apart the Workers’ Revolutionary Party were not some accident or some clash of personalities. They were a sustained and deliberate decision by MI5 to smash the organisation because they feared it was going to become too pivotal in terms of domestic politics.’
The public image of Livingstone as a lovable Londoner was as wrong-headed as most other public images. None the less, the WRP’s support for Baathism was a one-off, which no other left-wing group imitated. Even the WRP abandoned Saddam after the start of the Iran – Iraq War in 1980. It met its bills by taking the shilling of Colonel Gaddafi’s