Red Paint

Regular readers will know that often, after I indulge in the more gracious aspects of my middle class lifestyle, I like to have a little rant on about Communists.

You know the chaps. The ones who used to justify MI5's expenses accounts before the Muslims arrived on the scene.

This weekend was no exception. After downing a dozen oysters and a magnum of Bolly at the Hotel Continental's fantastic Whitstable Oyster Fishery Co Restaurant, apparantly I rolled down Whitstable's Oxford Street and made a very generous offer for the 1952 Penguin edition of "The Communist Technique in Britain" by Bob Darke.

For those who don't know, Bob was a CP Councillor in my part of Hackney, a bus conductor and sometime shop steward at Lewis Bergers Paint Factory in Morning Lane.

I should explain that, in the bookshop, my hand was actually moving in the direction of "Correct Use Of The Whip" by Zara Phillips, in the mistaken impression that it was a handbook on executing the office of Labour Group controller.

Having made this inadvertant purchase and had the tome wrapped and delivered, I was bitterly disappointed to find that my latest acquisition contained utterly boring drivel of relevance neither to the contemporary politics of Hackney nor to my sexual predelictions. So - an invaluable source of material for my blog!

I can't be a***d right now, but when the bubbly has completely worn off I'll have a little poke about and write some stuff about trade union organising in Hackney in the 1950s. You know the sort of stuff. How the Jewish community used to vote Communist before it switched en-masse to voting Tory, the collapse of the Party in the face of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, how Labour inherited the trade union mantle of the Party and learnt to expel dissident trouble-makers... that sort of thing. Anything to avoid addressing the issues afflicting the Labour Party today. I might just call my old mate Monty and see if he's got some material I can regurgitate.