British intelligence officers believed Bob Edwards would have passed to the KGB every secret he could

As a young firebrand the future Labour MP Bob Edwards met Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.

As an older man the Soviet Union presented him with its third highest decoration: the Order of the People’s Friendship.

Edwards, according to Britain’s security services, was a willing informant who would have passed to the KGB every secret he could.

Oleg Gordievsky discovered Edwards’s importance as he prepared for his posting to London in 1982 by reading KGB dossiers on its “active cases” in Britain. One was devoted to Edwards, right, Labour MP in the West Midlands from 1955 to 1987. He died in 1990.

According to Gordievsky, Edwards’s recruitment was “lost in the mists of antiquity”. For many years he was run by Leonid Zaitsev, who became