Maybe it’s because our various Trotskyite groups have been so marginalised by this good-humoured scorn down the decades that they’ve become far less threatening than they might wish. Certainly they’re not taken remotely seriously by voters, who are sensible enough never to knowingly elect them. Which is why the sport of entryism became so popular back in the ’70s and ’80s: if we can’t get elected on our own platform, the Trots reckoned, let’s get elected on somebody else’s.

That “somebody else”, of course, was the Labour Party.

For these 50 shades of red, mostly from Militant (now imaginatively rebranded as The Socialist Party) and Socialist Organiser, Labour was merely a vehicle, a means to an end. The hard Left had as much regard for the Labour Party as a tick has for a sheep.

It might seem discourteous to categorise the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, as a blood sucking, parasitic insect, except for the fact that he himself has declared his contempt for the beast on which he is currently riding: “I’m not in the Labour Party because I’m a believer of the Labour Party as some supreme body or something God-given or anything like that. It’s a tactic. It’s as simple as that. If it’s no longer a useful vehicle, move on,” he once said.