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I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!

Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Chemical Ali’, 1988

IN 1989 the University of California Press brought out Republic of Fear by one Samir al-Khalil. The author acknowledged that he was working under a pseudonym. ‘I owe a handful of very dear friends a great deal in writing this book. But things being what they are under the Baath, I can no more mention their names than I can write under my own.’

Kanan Makiya knew that critics of Saddam felt bullets hit the back of their heads wherever they lived. When he appeared on radio to promote his book, he wore a wig and insisted the sound engineers distorted his voice.

In its own way, Republic of Fear was a risky venture for the University of California Press. Dozens of publishers had rejected it. The ethical problem for reputable houses was how to deal with an author who refused to reveal his identity and left them wide open to the risk of being taken in by a hoaxer. Lynne Withey, an editor at the University of California Press, was prepared to take a chance. She thought the book was too important to ignore and agreed to consider the manuscript after Afsaneh Najmabadi swore her husband was not a conman. ‘Lynne never talked to me,’ said Kanan. ‘The University of California Press had never published an anonymous book before, let alone a book written under a pseudonym. It took great courage and a special decision at the level of the board of directors.’

There was also a more straightforward commercial obstacle. The publishers who turned down Makiya reasoned that few cared about Iraq, and they were right. The great powers wanted an Iraqi strongman to check the revolutionary threat of Islamist Iran, and their politicians, diplomats, spies and publics were not willing to look too closely at the consequences of realpolitik.

A wave of bad faith engulfed the rich world’s liberals after the second Iraq war, and they took the indifference of the Western elites of the Eighties as proof that Saddam was the fault of Britain and America – the West’s monster and the West’s puppet. On the rare occasions they forced themselves to confront his crimes, they had always to add the caveat that they had been committed with Western aid. Even on 19 October 2005 when the worst tyrant she would see in her life went on trial, even as she stood among the graves of the Kurds of Halabja, Caroline Hawley of the BBC was adamant that ‘each headstone here represents a family wiped out with weapons that Saddam Hussein bought from the West’.

It was tosh, of course. Saddam was not left in power so he could keep the profits flowing to Anglo-American arms manufacturers. Nor was he any more America’s puppet than Hitler was a pawn of MI6. For an Iraqi, the charge of being an agent of American imperialism or British Freemasonry was as dangerous as the charge of being a Zionist spy. After the fall of Baghdad, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute examined the records of ‘actual deliveries of major conventional weapons’ to Iraq between 1973 and 2002, and found that 57 per cent of Saddam’s weapons came from the Soviet Union, 13 per cent from France and 12 per cent from China. The United States sold about half of 1 per cent, while Britain’s sales were worth $79 million, or about one-fifth of 1 per cent, a fraction so small the Swedes rounded it down to the nearest whole number, which was zero.

Weapons of mass destruction did ‘come from the West’ in a sense – West Germany, whose companies provided Saddam with one of the largest chemical weapons manufacturing industries in the world. (In a revolting example of Cold War cooperation, the East German communists gave Saddam’s forces training on how to use them.) Meanwhile France built the Tammuz nuclear reactor, which might have given Saddam the bomb if the Israeli air force had not infuriated Jacques Chirac by blowing it up.

These figures appear to exonerate Britain and America, but they are not as kind as they look. The people in power in both countries did not want to know about the Iraq Republic of Fear described, and one of the few remarks of Henry Kissinger’s that is worth remembering explains why. ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose,’ he said of the Iran – Iraq War. When Khomeini’s revolutionary armies looked as if they would win, and seize Iraq’s oil fields and go on to control a large chunk of the world’s oil by seizing the Saudi Arabian oil fields as well, the United States intervened. It helped the Baathists with facts rather than arms sales. What Saddam got out of the approaches first from the Carter administration and then from Donald Rumsfeld for the Reagan administration was an intelligence-sharing agreement. AWACS spy planes recorded Iranian troop deployments so the Iraqi army could concentrate its fire. American jets brought down Iranian civilian and military flights to deter the Ayatollah Khomeini from destroying the Iraqi war economy by sinking Iraqi tankers in the Persian Gulf.

As valuable to Saddam as the intelligence was the silence. Instead of fighting the Islamic revolution themselves, Britain and America were happy for a fascistic despot to do its fighting for them. So there was no complaint when Saddam acquired between 2,000 and 4,000 tons of chemical agents; no real protest beyond mealy-mouthed mutterings when he used them to kill about 50,000 Iranian soldiers. Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in 1984 to assure the Baathists that what condemnations there had been were for form’s sake and should not be taken personally. To stop the Islamic revolution spreading, the West was prepared to hold its tongue.

From 1987, it had to bite it. Saddam was about to sink lower than his worst enemies had imagined possible and organize the first genocide since Pol Pot’s slaughter of the Cambodians. The victims were the Kurds, the largest people on earth without a state of their own. They never received the attention given to the Palestinians or even the Basques and the Catalans. In part, it was Moynihan’s Law: the Kurds were trapped in the closed or semi-closed societies of nationalist Turkey, Islamist Iran and Baathist Syria and Iraq. To make matters worse, you could not really blame ‘capitalism’ or ‘Western imperialism’ for their suffering unless you went back to the failure of the great powers to establish a Kurdish state at the end of the First World War. The Kurds were an uncomfortable people who could not be tidied away into neat boxes.

In all their occupied territories, they fought guerrilla wars against enemies who regarded them as racial inferiors. With the Baath Party diverted by the Iran – Iraq War, they allied with Iranian forces and went on the advance. In 1987, Saddam determined to punish them by exterminating all Kurds who weren’t under his direct control. He made his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid (‘Chemical Ali’) secretary-general of the Northern Bureau, the administrative centre that covered Iraqi Kurdistan, and gave him complete discretion. ‘Comrade al-Majid’s decisions shall be mandatory for all state agencies,’ Saddam told his underlings. Al-Majid had free rein to ‘solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs’.

The echo of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution was prophetic. On his arrival, al-Majid promised the staff of the Northern Bureau: ‘I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!’

It always comes to this. They always say the same thing when they think outsiders aren’t listening. When the pretensions of the workers’ state or the thousand-year Reich or the glorious union of Arabs are stripped away, when the differences between communism and fascism are forgotten, what remains is the sneer of the psychopathic gangster who knows he’s got the cops in his pocket.

When he ordered the Great Purge of 1936, Stalin said: ‘Who’s going to remember this riffraff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of?’

When he ordered the massacre of the Polish intelligentsia, Hitler said: ‘After all, who today speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?’

When tens of millions starved in the Great Leap Forward, the single greatest political crime of the twentieth century, Mao Tse-tung told the few brave officials who condemned themselves to death by speaking out: ‘A few children die in the kindergarten, a few old men die in the Happiness Court. If there’s no death people can’t exist. From Confucius to now it would be disastrous if people didn’t die.’

Hitler committed suicide and Italian partisans hung Mussolini from a meat hook, but Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Franco and Amin died in their beds. Because of the American and British armies, I’m glad to say that at the time of writing Saddam Hussein and Comrade al-Majid are on trial in Baghdad. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the ‘realism’ of the UN route in Darfur has allowed the Islamist government of Sudan to get away with genocide.

Al-Majid had sound historical grounds for thinking that he could ‘fuck’ the international community and that there would be many among its statespersons and foreign policy analysts who would lie back and enjoy the experience. He launched the Anfal (‘spoils’) campaign to solve the Kurdish ‘problem’ with the reasonable expectation that he would never be held to account. Waves of Iraqi troops plundered and destroyed 4,000 Kurdish villages. Any man, woman or child who lived in the ‘prohibited zone’ outside the government’s authorized centres was a legitimate target.

The Kurds’ initial attempts to rally international support got nowhere. They would have been a total failure had it not been for Peter Galbraith, son of John Kenneth, and a staff member for the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He used his pull to persuade the Baathists to allow him to travel into Kurdistan. He drove north with mounting confusion. Kurdish villages that appeared on his maps weren’t there on the ground. He would stop at what should have been a busy settlement and see nothing but rubble. Galbraith made a stink when he returned to Washington and got an international campaign going. Despite his efforts, the massacre of the Kurds would have meant as little to the world as the massacres of the Armenians and boyars had not al-Majid ordered the bombing of Halabja with a mixture of VX gas, mustard gas and sarin.

Like Makiya, I’ve tried to avoid the pornography of violence. Atrocity stories are a species of blackmail. The writer – or more often broadcaster these days – is in effect saying ‘agree with me or you are guilty by association’. It is too easy.

I have therefore spared you the sacks filled with starving cats, the rape rooms and the plastic-shredding machines. In the case of the Anfal campaign, however, you cannot understand it without understanding the thoroughness with which the Baath slaughtered a minimum of 100,000 Kurds. All over northern Iraq, staggered bewildered people with stories of the utmost poignancy. Abdel-Qadir al-Askari will serve for all of them. He was on a hill above his village of Guptapa when he saw planes flying in low over the rooftops. He ran down and found his mother collapsed by the river, her mouth biting the mud bank. ‘I wanted to kiss her but I knew that if I did, the chemicals would be passed on. Even now I deeply regret not kissing my beloved mother.’ He continued along the river and found the bodies of his children, his brother, his father, his nieces and his nephews. ‘At this point I lost my feelings. I didn’t know who to cry to anymore.’

No one outside Kurdistan would know what you meant if you talked about Guptapa. Halabja’s name flew round the world, not because it was the apogee of the genocide, but because the Baathists blundered by wiping out civilians fifteen miles from the Iranian border. Journalists were able to get in without permission from Baghdad and see the poisoned corpses for themselves: the husband holding the hand of the wife; the father flattened against a wall with his arms round his infant son; the mother caught with her back arched to protect her child … hundreds of bodies frozen at the moment of death, as if fossilized in the ash of a new Vesuvius.

Moynihan’s Law had no jurisdiction, and Halabja joined Guernica, Katyn and My Lai in that eccentric but necessary list of comparatively small twentieth-century massacres which act as shorthand notes for atrocities that are too colossal to comprehend. There was a media storm, but that quickly passed as media storms do. Galbraith persuaded the US Senate to pass a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq, but the House of Representatives blocked it. George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, condemned Iraq, but the State Department was a true friend to dictators in adversity and his officials calmed him down.

To its enormous credit, the only political faction to stand up consistently against fascism and genocide was the liberal-left. Human Rights Watch established itself as an alternative to Amnesty International on the strength of its investigations in Iraq. The book that was to become Republic of Fear didn’t originate in discussions with a major publishing house but with debates Makiya had with fellow Trotskyists. They gathered around New Left Review, a journal for socialist intellectuals that was based in Soho and edited by Perry Anderson, an English Marxist of the upper class. Before Makiya published, Tariq Ali, a Pakistani Marxist of the upper class and New Left Review board member, made a documentary with him about Iraq’s suffering. The most left-wing MPs in the Labour Party lined up to denounce Saddam as a ‘fascist’, while the racial persecution of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey moved Harold Pinter, the left-wing playwright, poet and future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to produce Mountain Language.

‘Your language is forbidden,’ a concentration camp officer bellows at a Kurdish woman. ‘It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists. Any questions?’

The play’s conceit was all too realistic: the world would never know of the suffering of the Kurds because the Kurds would never be allowed to speak.

The Left, which had thrown the accusation of ‘fascism’ around so freely, still had the sense to fight the real thing and offer fraternal support to its victims.

Their struggle was our struggle. Truly, it was.

There was one exception. The Tories who made excuses for the judicial murder of Farzad Bazoft and the other crimes of Saddam Hussein did have their counterparts in a small group on the Left in the Seventies and Eighties. It barely seemed worth bothering about at the time, but in retrospect you can see that it beat the path from the Left to far right that was to turn into a six-lane highway in the twenty-first century.

The Workers’ Revolutionary Party was one of the ugliest political movements the British left has produced. It was a cult of the personality that venerated the squat, bald figure of Gerry Healy. According to his account of his life, Healy was a poor Irishman who began work on a ship at the age of 14. Disgusted by the poverty and the hardships he and his contemporaries endured, he became a communist in the Thirties. He switched to Trotskyism because of the Hitler – Stalin pact and spent the rest of his life fighting the sectarian wars of the far left, whose hatreds were in inverse proportion to their impact on British society. Officially, the WRP programme was to seize power in Britain, as the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat on behalf of the British working class. Because it knew how Stalin had corrupted the Russian Revolution, there would be no mistake this time. The errors of the past would be avoided, and Healy would follow the shining path of Leon Trotsky and create a communist Utopia in the Britain of the Seventies.

Maybe Healy believed it could be done, he certainly never lacked self-confidence, but the sole practical effect of his life was to exercise a dictatorship over his party’s members.

There are plenty of personality cults in mainstream politics. The adulation accorded to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their prime and pomp by moist-eyed journalists destroyed any sentimental notions of the cussedness of the freeborn Englishman and the fearlessness of the British press. Public scrutiny and the chance of removing a leader at a democratic election keep the cultism under control, however. In the little universes of the late twentieth-century totalitarian sects, it flourished without restraint. Lenin and Trotsky had driven the far left round the bend by proving that a minuscule party governed by fanatical leaders could change the course of history, if, and only if, it followed the correct strategy. For almost a century, other would-be dictators sought to find the magic formula. From the Sixties through to the Nineties the Socialist Workers’ Party had Tony Cliff – a noisy and dense man, who believed his followers could seize power if they understood where the Russian Revolution had gone wrong. The Militant Tendency had Ted Grant who believed that his Trotskyists could infiltrate and take over the Labour Party of the Eighties, and complained furiously when it refused to accommodate him.

Healy was the best, however: the perfect example of the politician as cult guru. Like Saddam, he combined megalomania and paranoia as he offered a part of the 1968 generation of middle-class Marxists a Manichaean ideology. On the one hand, he said, British society had decayed to such a point it was possible to imagine that a great revolutionary could storm the citadels of the state, a point he emphasized to 10,000 supporters at a 1973 rally at Wembley while standing beneath a 40-foot image of himself. On the other, he warned that all might be lost. The ruling class was planning ‘massive state repressions against the working class and the Marxist movement’. It would rather turn Britain into a fascist state than allow him to take over.

Like many another cult leader, Healy created an ideology of longing and fear. There would be socialism or fascism: heaven or hell. The stakes were so high, there was so much to gain or lose, his followers had no choice but to hurl themselves into the struggle, and obey his commands.

Initially, serious people on the Left gave credence to Healy’s claims that a British Bolshevik revolution was possible. The post-war social democratic consensus fell apart in the early Seventies, and Britain for a moment did feel like a country on the edge of pre-revolutionary chaos. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said they would not trade with the North American and European countries that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The price of oil shot up and unemployment and inflation went up with it. Central bankers decided not to worry about inflation and to cut interest rates to prevent unemployment rising. In defiance of every law of economics they thought they knew, they got the worst of both worlds: stagflation with unemployment and inflation increasing together. For the first time since the Thirties – and the last time until the present day – the extremes prospered. Neo-Nazi parties did well in British elections as anti-immigrant sentiment grew, and the far left became a significant force in industry as strikes swept through it and the public services.

In 1973, the National Theatre reflected the apocalyptic mood by staging The Party, by Trevor Griffiths. It is a hard text to wade through now, and I doubt if a producer will ever revive it as anything other than a curiosity piece. Everything about the play feels ridiculous because the drama, such as it is, consists of characters representing various shades of Marxist opinion arguing about when and how socialist revolution will come to Britain.

At the time, though, Griffiths’ work did not seem peculiar. Makiya’s comrades on the far left were not alone in believing that the system was about to break down. A glum A. J. P. Taylor predicted that the end was nigh. ‘I’ve been expecting the collapse of capitalism all my life, but now that it comes I am rather annoyed,’ he said. ‘There’s no future for this country and not much for anywhere else … Revolution is knocking at the door.’ Geoffrey Rippon, a minister in the 1970 Tory government, agreed: ‘We are on the same course as the Weimar government with runaway inflation and ultra-high unemployment.’ When Labour took over in 1974, its ministers were as glum. One warned Harold Wilson that the private sector was facing ‘wholesale domestic liquidation’. Should inflation accelerate further, ‘a deep constitutional crisis can no longer be treated as fanciful speculation’.

The rise of the far right and far left, the strikes, the power cuts, the inflation, the slump and a civil war in Northern Ireland pushed Sir William Armstrong, the head of the Home Civil Service, into a spectacular nervous breakdown. He was ‘really quite mad at the end’, said one Conservative minister, who described how he stumbled on Sir William at a Chekhovian summit of British and American leaders in a country house outside Oxford. As rain lashed the windows, the minister found the supposedly cool-headed civil servant ‘lying on the floor and talking about moving the Red army from here and the Blue army from there’.

If Trevor Griffiths’ Marxist delusions now seem like the fantasies of a fruitcake, he was no fruitier than the mandarins.

The Party is set during the student riots in Paris in 1968. Healy appears as John Tagg, a character played at the National Theatre by Sir Laurence Olivier, no less. Beyond Griffiths’ assumption that a Marxist revolution was possible in Britain, the play isn’t as didactic as the worst of the agit-prop of the Seventies. Griffiths allows his characters to put forward competing points of view. One who has seen Tagg at close quarters warns that life in his party was one of demeaning subservience. He illustrates the debasement by quoting the dismal speech the cornered Leon Trotsky made when he realized Stalin was using his own theory of revolutionary dictatorship to destroy him.

Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against the party. The party in the last analysis is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems. I know one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through the party, for history has not created other ways for the realisation of what is right.

Clearly, Griffiths didn’t buy the Workers’ Revolutionary Party sales pitch in every detail. Nevertheless, John Tagg is the centre of his play. It is his views on the chances of revolution everyone else argues about; it is his criticism of dilettante middle-class students the rest of the cast debate. Griffiths does not say he is right, but treats him with respect as a substantial figure who is worth hearing.

Healy had a hold over theatrical types. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were among his most devoted supporters, while the actor members of Equity were the only workers to give him a toehold in the trade union movement – always a bad sign for an aspiring leader of a proletarian revolution. Actors have a professional predilection for extreme emotion, which the thundering Healy satisfied with his bombast. They obeyed him because he was also an authentic member of the working class, who ‘realized early in his political career that many middle class people desperately wanted to be abused and humiliated by a self-appointed representative of the proletariat’.

Radicalism in Britain was to come from the free-market right not the far left. When what revolutionary fervour there was faded, the presence of the Redgraves turned the WRP from the subject of grave consideration on the South Bank to a running joke in Fleet Street. Poor little rich girls playing at revolution, actors who lose the plot when they speak without a script … these were butts for satire from central casting.

Vastly enjoyable it was, too, for the chortling newspaper readers. Yet it was also the case that if Healy had seized power the gutters would have bubbled with blood. Britain is not Iraq, and Healy’s grandiose ambitions to be Britain’s proletarian dictator made the press find him funnier still. The laughter missed the point that while he could not rule globally he could terrorize locally.

Healy convinced his followers that their enemies were everywhere, and probably believed it himself. Outsiders visiting the party headquarters in Clapham, south London, were surprised to see a sheet of polished steel along one wall of his office. He explained it was ‘to frustrate the listening devices trained on him day and night by MI5’. A fleet of vehicles waited in the car park outside so that WRP militants could make their escape if the fascist coup came.

In September 1975, the first of many scandals to hit the party broke when a young actress and WRP member called Irene Gorst told the Observer how obsessive terrors haunted a redbrick Edwardian mansion that Corin Redgrave had bought for the WRP in the Derbyshire countryside. Healy changed its name from the pastoral ‘White Meadows’ to the insurgent ‘Red House’, and made it the party’s residential training centre. The rules for members and their families were strict, Gorst said. The party banned fraternization with villagers over beers in the local pub. If your children cried outside the lecture hall, you had to wait until the lecture had finished before finding and comforting them. Nothing was to stand in the way of the preparations for revolution.

The hierarchy ordered her to go to its Clapham headquarters and board a minibus that was to take members to the Red House. She missed it because an IRA bomb had exploded near her home in Kensington the night before. She couldn’t get into her flat until the small hours, and waited behind the police cordon drinking tea with the ambulance drivers. The next morning an old boyfriend called to make sure she was all right. He insisted on taking her to lunch and tried to talk her out of her infatuation with revolutionary politics. She thanked him for the meal, then ignored his advice and struggled to Derbyshire under her own steam to apologize for being late.

She described how an inquisition consisting of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and two party officials ordered her into a room.

‘Then they started on me. How long had I been working for Special Branch? Where had I planted the bombs and the drugs? Why did I miss the coach?

‘At first I was very flippant. I would say things like, “Let’s see where did I put the bombs? Was it in the loo? Was it under my bed?”’

After an hour, she tried to leave. They pushed her back into a chair. ‘Don’t you dare,’ cried a party official. ‘You’re not leaving until we’ve found out what we want to know.’

He was particularly angry that she had drunk tea with the ambulance crews. ‘Didn’t I realize that the police planted those bombs and would have been delighted to find a WRP member on the spot.’

So it went on, all day. They searched her luggage. They examined her address book and stripped down her transistor radio. They imagined fantastical links between her brother and the CIA. They treated as highly suspicious the fact that her father’s drinks company bought cork from Portugal – then under the same right-wing dictatorship whose oranges so repelled my mother. ‘Ahaa,’ they said in a knowing way.

‘Even if you discover I am what you think I am, what are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Put me up against a wall and shoot me?’

Gorst said she was ‘quite hysterical by this time’ and told her interrogators, ‘You’re all mad, let me go.’

They did in the end, and she went to the Observer. The WRP said it had not held her against her will, sued for libel and lost. In answers to questions from the judge, the jury said that although it did not necessarily believe every word of Irene Gorst’s testimony it did believe the main thrust of it. What mistakes the jury suspected did not alter its decision to find against the WRP because they did not ‘materially injure’ the accusations against the party.

The Observer may not have got every last detail right, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that Gorst was accurately describing a sect in the grip of raging paranoia.

Fear has its uses. Political cults create their own reality as effectively as the Scientologists or the Exclusive Brethren. Their leaders cannot allow members to take at face value evidence that contradicts their teachings. It has to be the result of a capitalist plot or a Jewish conspiracy or the machinations of Freemasons or a disinformation campaign by the security services. To maintain control the cult must blacken the world beyond its walls. Families are the most credible source of dissonant information. Parents, husbands, wives, lovers and children are the people whose cries of ‘Get a grip!’ or ‘Don’t be daft’ are most likely to hit home. Nazi Germany, communist Russia, Maoist China and Baathist Iraq all worked to weaken family influence. So too did those tiny mirrors in Britain and America, those fragments of totalitarianism, which winked and sparkled as they reflected the dream of Utopia.

Right-wing militia groups in the United States encouraged their members to abandon their homes for ‘retreats’ in the wilderness. The far-left cults matched their determination to hide their members from the malign influences of unreliable relatives. Corin Redgrave’s first wife, Deirdre, described how Healy reacted when she refused to join the party:

I was suddenly commanded into Healy’s presence. Two rather grim looking henchmen took me by the arms, albeit gently. He looked at me with a steady, even gaze and demanded, ‘Why don’t you join the party? Why won’t you support your husband?’

I told Healy quite clearly that I had two young children to bring up – and I didn’t want them to grow up disturbed. I wanted them to be normal kids. If you are a member of the WRP – a real dedicated member, that is – you would seldom see your children. You are travelling everywhere. Bradford one day. Cardiff the next.

She refused to accept the party line, and the marriage broke up.

In her almost charmingly naïve autobiography, Vanessa Redgrave describes sitting on the bed of her young daughter, Natasha Richardson. ‘Natasha appealed to me to spend more time with her. I tried to explain that our political struggle was for her future, and that of all the children of her generation. She looked at me with a serious, sweet smile. “But I need you now. I won’t need you so much then”.’

Cult leaders know they must exhaust their followers as well as isolate them. The harder the party or the church forces them to work, the less time they have to think for themselves. As important, the harder they work, the greater their investment and the tougher it becomes to accept that the years of labour have been an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Overly rational historians wonder why supporters of causes from Bolshevism through to Islamism don’t give up when they realize that the death and suffering will never bring the workers’ paradise or new Caliphate; why they fight on for decades, only to achieve more death and suffering? They forget the emotional outlay and the lost lives of dead comrades and martyrs. For immense and minute revolutionary movements alike, more suffering is easier to accept than the admission that all the previous suffering was in vain. Macbeth explained messianic politics better than most historians when he said:

I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Trying to find rational explanations for the irrational sects of the far left and far right is like trying to find ‘the root causes’ of Islamism or trying to explain Saddam Hussein by looking at the ‘realism’ of Iraqi foreign policy. It is more profitable to look at persecution fantasies, group loyalty, the strongman’s will to power and the feeble personality’s willingness to obey.

Once the sect has its claws dug in, it takes a tremendous jolt to shake devotees free. In On the Edge, their study of cultish politics, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth describe how Kate Blakeney, a mother of four, threw herself into organizing meetings and making collections for the WRP. She distributed its leaflets in the streets of Oxford and sold its newspaper at factory gates. The more newspapers she sold the more copies the party sent her to sell. If she couldn’t sell them, the party didn’t mind. She had to pay for them whether she sold them or not. The more money she collected, the more Healy demanded. Blakeney finally allowed him to debit funds direct from her account so he could take what he wanted at will. She borrowed from her friends until she ran out of ones she could tap. Once she had met the party’s demands, she barely had enough left over to feed her children.

Still she kept on working herself into the ground. ‘We were too busy, always busy, and could hope only to catch a few hours’ sleep.’ Still she carried on believing that the party would either triumph and be a beacon to the human race or go down as the first victim of a British fascist dictatorship.

One day Healy asked to meet her in his London flat. She went hoping to convince him to give her and her comrades in Oxford a respite from his demands:

[He] opened the door for me. He had been drinking. Something was all wrong. I pushed by his large body, sat down in the chair and started to make my report. Healy came towards me, was hovering over me. He was not listening to a word I was saying.

He wanted only one thing from me, my sexual submission. For a moment, I just stared at him: fat, ugly, red-faced. Was this the price I was supposed to pay for some respite for my area?

Something snapped in me. I guess it was my faith, my belief. The dream that drove me forward now seemed unreal, and reality entered, tawdry, petty, 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 Libya instead – a little more than a shilling, to be precise, more like £500,000. Leftists of the period would have dismissed as absurd the idea that 23 years on, the greatest demonstration in the history of the Left would be led by Saddam’s avowed apologists without so much as a squeak of protest coming from the morally earnest and intellectually respectable voices of liberal England.