Jeremy Corbyn arrives on stage at the Labour women’s national conference in Liverpool yesterday

A senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn who quit the Communist Party only two years ago once declared the history of Labour governments in Britain was a “miserable litany of disasters” as he called for Labour to admit revolutionaries.

Andrew Murray, chief of staff of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, wrote a book on the history of British communism denouncing both Labour’s backing for “reformism” rather than revolution and its refusal to let the Communist Party affiliate with the Labour Party.

The details are contained in a dossier on Murray which is being circulated by Corbyn’s Labour opponents.

In the book, The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis to 1941, published in 1995, Murray expressed support for the creation of a “Soviet Britain” which