AS A former staff journalist on Socialist Worker, Peter Hitchens really should think twice before repeatedly banging on about the one-time Trotskyist affiliations of a fair few New Labour cabinet ministers.

Does the expression ‘spent conviction within the meaning of the rehabilitation of offenders act’ really have no meaning to him?

Yes, yes. We all know by now that Alistair Darling sold Black Dwarf outside Edinburgh Waverley station, Alan Milburn worked in a Tyneside leftie bookshop nicknamed Haze of Dope, and Stephen Byers spent a stint as a Millie.

The question is, does the brand of politics these people identified with decades ago connect in any way to their current praxis? Hitchens Minor simply asserts this to be the case:

None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags.

Evidence?

And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about. Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims?

OK Peter, name three policies outlined in the Transitional Progamme – and don’t you dare tell me they didn’t make you read in when you were in the International Socialists – that have been enacted by New Labour in office since 1997? Nationalising a couple of banks to bail out capitalism doesn’t count.

Where exactly does Trotsky advocate cuts in corporation tax financed by scrapping student grants and reductions in benefits for single mothers and the disabled?

Did I miss the pamphlet in which the Old Man demanded the maintenance of Tory anti-union laws and Tory privatisation policies, draconian measures against asylum seekers, increased income inequality, compulsory ID cards in a capitalist state and the renewal of Trident?

Not only did New Labour fail to institute the New Jerusalem, it hasn’t even brought us to the outter suburbs of the greater Tel Aviv conurbation.

Never mind. It did give me quite a chuckle to read that new defence secretary Bob Ainsworth was a candidate member of the Coventry branch of the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s, at a time when I was a fully paid up cadre IMGer.

Technically, the IMG no longer existed at this point. Internally we were known as the Socialist League; externally, we were supporters of the newspaper Socialist Action. But such small print is for Trot trainspotters only, I guess. But let Peter continue:

I can recall members of the International Marxist Group yelling ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on student demonstrations. So I was interested to see stories that the latest Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, was a ‘candidate member’ (they didn’t let just anyone in) of the IMG in 1982 and 1983, when he was 30 years old, not a student.

No, we didn’t just let anyone in. It was a standing joke on the far left that you actually had to pass an exam in Marxist theory before you were allowed to sign up, although this may be an urban myth. The stipulation was certainly not in place at the time I joined.

Nevertheless, the candidate system operated for a purpose, which was to determine an applicant’s degree of political commitment and suitability for membership of a revolutionary organisation.

To become a candidate member was in itself a conscious decision, and the term had specific meaning. To use the phrase we used at the time, candidate membership conferred ‘all of the duties but none of the rights’ enjoyed by full members.

Yes, you had to sell the paper. Yes, you had to pay a fair chunk of your income in dues. And yes, you had to go to endless bloody meetings, even though you got only an indicative vote.

Now, I wasn’t based in Coventry and do not recall meeting Ainsworth at the time. I have no idea of the extent of his involvement. But the insistence on the part of his office that he simply attended a couple of IMG meetings at the invitation of a mate does not ring true. That would have made him at best a close contact, and would not even have qualified him as a sympathiser.

I guess it is even possible that we failed him after his spell as a candidate. We were an organisation with a certain rigour and panache, and neither are qualities that Ainsworth exudes in bucketloads.

The question is, does a tangential brush with the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International disqualify someone from being defence secretary? There are any number of reasons to doubt his suitability for the post, as the man himself admits, but having been a bit of a leftie a quarter of a century ago does not strike me as one of them. There are no indications whatsoever that Ainsworth still clings to one iota of whatever he once may or may not have believed in.

Hitchens’ own progression from Cliffite to Conservative parliamentary wannabe and from there to the further shores of rightism beyond the Tory Party illustrate quite clearly that there is no correlation whatsoever between a youthful paper seller and a mature reactionary, even if they are biologically speaking one and the same person.