I must have met Reuben Falber around the time that he last took money from the Soviets. From 1958 to 1978, every few months, the rather unassuming man with the thick spectacles who was the assistant general secretary of the British Communist Party would brush up against someone from the Russian embassy outside Barons Court Tube station or on Hampstead Heath, and come away heavier to the tune of one envelope full of used banknotes. Only three people in the Communist Party knew about it. When the news came out after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was some consternation. My dad, who had worked as a full-time party official for 20 years, was genuinely astonished.

You wouldn’t do it that way now. The