The former prime minister has confessed to a student flirtation with revolutionary Marxism. At least he grew out of it
by Oliver Kamm / August 10, 2017 / Leave a comment
Photo: Victoria Jones/PA Wire/PA Images
Tony Blair, it turns out, was inspired to enter politics under the intellectual influence of the Bolshevik revolution. In a BBC Radio 4 interview, he disclosed that his life was changed when, as a student, he read the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Leon Trotsky. Though Blair acknowledges that his flirtation with Marxism was brief, he stresses its transformative impact on his thinking: “I suddenly thought the world’s full of these injustices and here’s this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create a Russian revolution and change the world. It was like a light going on.”
I’m one of a minority of pundits who believe Blair’s words should be more closely heeded, especially on the folly of Brexit and the nullity of the politics of Jeremy Corbyn, than they generally are. Nor is he alone in finding Trotsky an inspirational figure. My late friend Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the far left earlier than is commonly supposed (in the Balkan wars of the 1990s), maintained to the end of his life that “even today a faint, saintly penumbra still emanates from the Old Man.”
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Norbert Francis
Norbert Francis