Just over 20 years ago, I visited the scene of Leon Trotsky’s murder. I was on holiday in Mexico City; a trip to his former home in the suburb of Coyoacán seemed pretty much obligatory. And there it all was: the study, set up to approximate its state just as the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader plunged the infamous ice pick into his head; the high walls and watchtowers; and the grave, featuring a huge hammer and sickle.

Leon Trotsky assassination scene, 1940 - a picture from the past Read more

I was intrigued to hear that, for a while, Trotsky had made a habit of nipping to the nearby home of the artist Frida Kahlo for what unreconstructed people would call a Bit of the Other; thrilled too to learn that after the ice pick had done its work, he had still managed to fight off his attacker, and ensure his arrest. I even bought a T-shirt. But what struck me most was the place’s air of dusty decline, and the sense that Trotsky’s legacy was now almost irrelevant.

But now look: 76 years after his death, the adopted surname of Lev Bronstein is on the front page of the Guardian. The deputy leader of a party that was recently in government is warning of “Trotsky entryists”. Tom Watson, indeed, has written to Jeremy Corbyn to rebut claims by aides of the leader that he is putting around “conspiracy theories”, and citing evidence that among the great wave of new Corbyn supporters are people from such Trotskyist outfits as the Socialist party and the snappily named Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – who, he says, are using tactics tried back in the 1980s, and organising within the party to increase their influence.

Fair play to Watson: even if the people he is talking about are few in number, their presence is real enough. I have met a few, enthusiastically trooping into Corbyn events, and also spoken to long-standing Labour party people being driven quietly mad by their trademark displays of righteous belligerence. And just to make one thing absolutely clear: dismay about their presence is hardly confined to opponents of the current leader. Watson says that between veteran “Trots” and younger, well-intentioned members of the Corbyn-supporting group Momentum “there are some old hands twisting young arms”. That may or may not be true, but there are lots of Momentum people who want nothing to do with these battle-hardened agitators – again, I have spoken to them – and with good reason.

I have met a few Trotskyists trooping into Corbyn events – and they're driving people mad with their righteousness

Younger readers may wonder what on earth all this is about. The answer involves 80 years of arcane history, and a baffling soup of splinter groups and cliques, from the International Marxist Group and the Workers Revolutionary party, to the Socialist Workers party and the Revolutionary Socialist League. We have not space to list them all here; neither would most people have the mental appetite.

Suffice to say that a great deal of the current fuss goes back to Militant – aka the Militant tendency – which initially took root in Merseyside, and whose people began to join the Labour party in the early 1960s. Twenty or so years later, buoyed by the fact that many local Labour parties were moribund and inward-looking and some people wanted a much more energetic politics, they had a lot going for them: their own newspaper, a clandestine organisation inside Labour, and two MPs, as well as control of Liverpool city council (whose most vocal figurehead was the legendary Derek Hatton, a man who eventually became involved in the great proletarian pastime of property development). Most of this was secured via “entryism”, which goes back to one of Trotsky’s tactical feints in the 1930s, whereby he urged his followers in France to cease operating as a separate political unit, and quietly crowd into the mainstream Socialist party.

The practice of Trotskyist politics has long been built around the idea of the “transitional demand”, a rather cynical manoeuvre whereby you encourage people to agitate for this or that – a hugely increased minimum wage, perhaps, or the end of all immigration controls – knowing full well it is unattainable within the current order of things, but that when the impossibility becomes apparent, the workers will belatedly wake up. In other words, the herd gets whipped up into a frenzy about something you know it won’t get, while you smugly sit things out, hoping that if everything aligns correctly, another crack will appear in the great bourgeois edifice. For non-Trots, what this kind of game entails is obvious: in tandem with the aforementioned entryism, it means you never know quite what you are dealing with.

I know this feeling well. Back in 1986, brimming with the socialist passions I had partly soaked up from such musicians as Billy Bragg and Paul Weller, I co-founded a branch of the Labour party’s youth wing in the well-known socialist hotbed of Tatton – then represented by the soon to be disgraced MP Neil Hamilton, and these days the adopted home turf of George Osborne. But the Labour Party Young Socialists, as it was known, was then controlled by Militant, and soon enough a few of their troops popped up in the constituency, quickly gaining control of the branch and the two seats it was granted on the local Labour general management committee. God knows what they were thinking: today Wilmslow, Knutsford and Northwich; tomorrow the world?

What happened to me in the interim was grim: repeatedly being accused of “not knowing my history” (true: I was 16) and becoming so miserable about a mixture of unpleasant behaviour and ulterior motives that one night I got home from yet another meeting and burst into tears. That was me done: after a last blast of activism in a nearby constituency where Militant was apparently not active, I jacked in the Labour party for the best part of 15 years.

Such was a very small manifestation of a brief but grim phase of Labour history. But if it’s all once again relevant, so might be one of its subplots: the fact that while the party leadership was rounding on Militant (who would eventually reappear as the Socialist party), among the people who opposed its chasing-out was Corbyn.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labour party moves against Militant, 1985

The details are in a freshly published edition of Michael Crick’s book Militant: the fact that as expulsions began, Corbyn struck a loud note of common cause from his part of the Labour left (“If expulsions are in order for Militant, they should apply to us too”), and was even the “provisional convenor” of something called the Defeat the Witch-Hunt campaign. His stance reflected the position of his guru Tony Benn, who cleaved to the old maxim “No enemies on the left”. Beyond an official insistence that the Socialist party remains a “proscribed organisation”, the extent to which the Labour leader still believes in such things is rather unclear: we may soon see, I suppose.

There is something noble about the fact that the Trotskyists are still here. They may even have gone through their own New Labour-esque process of revision and reform: the Militants I knew always assured me that their revolutionary plan was based on nothing less than the nationalisation of the top 200 companies, but I see from the Socialist party website that this has now been reduced to a modest 150.

Aside from all that, the Militant founder and big cheese Peter Taaffe reckons not just that he has a good chance of soon being readmitted to the party that chucked him out all those years ago, but that when it comes to the Corbyn insurgency, “The lava of this revolution is still hot” (tssss!) and that the new leader’s adversaries will not “stop the winds of history as they’re developing at the moment”. On the face if it, then, he is now a paid-up Corbynite. Or maybe it’s just more “transitional” mischief. That’s the thing about Trotskyists: you can never tell.