It should come as no surprise to those who know about the New Statesman’s history that in the 1940s and 50s a number of the staff “walked on both sides of the street”. They were reputed to be serving the communist cause while also reporting to the British secret services. In 1949 George Orwell gave the government’s Information Research Department a notorious blacklist of “crypto-communists and fellow travellers who should not be trusted”.

It included the NS editor, Kingsley Martin, and a future editor, Richard Crossman, (although Orwell thought he was “too dishonest to be outright FT”) , the revered columnist J B Priestley, Dorothy Woodman (another NS columnist who was Martin’s partner) and the assistant editor Norman MacKenzie, though he was qualified with a question mark……