David Aaronovitch, Party Animals: My Party and Other Communists:' Under the bed with the reds', book review

This book charts David Aaronovitch's starting point and some causes of his rightward shift and is a colourful, sentimental, damning and funny part-history, part-autobiography

A dull, conformist life is often a happy one, certainly in childhood. Particularly if, like David Aaronovitch, you discovered at school how hoisting home-made placards on marches, watching badly dubbed Russian films, and attending jumble sales filled with cast-off knickers to raise funds for the Communist Party of Great Britain was weird.

Even in the burgeoning bohemianism of 1960s Britain, this bookworm was punched by less intellectually driven secondary school classmates, while he did not fully appreciate the factionalism of the hard-left until university Freshers’ Fair.

He signed-up to the Socialist Society and later that evening tried it on with the attractive girl who ran the stall. She slapped him for being a “Stalinist”, because he had also joined Oxford’s Communist society.

This is the first of many funny digressions in Party Animals, which is ostensibly a briskly written memoir of growing up among communists. Today, Mr Aaronovitch is a hated figure of the hard-left, which considers him a neo-liberal columnist for The Times and a Blair apologist who supported US imperialism in Iraq.

A former journalist for this newspaper, Aaronovitch still has friends here who view him in a far more favourable light. I have never met him, but however you define his intellectual journey, this book charts his starting point and some causes of his rightward shift.

Aaronovitch’s father was Sam, the autodidact son of Jewish immigrants who became a senior intellectual figure in the Communist Party. His mother, Lavender, was a true Communist believer who was nevertheless of more upper-class stock.

He was not close to his father, who seemingly spent all hours working. Sam found looking after young children an inconvenience. If Lavender was ill, Sam would take them to the party’s Farringdon Road office.

Aaronovitch’s relationship with his mother was even more difficult, though her frequently cited diary is an important guide to her family’s occasionally deluded lives.

Party Animals is a colourful, sentimental, damning and funny part-history, part-autobiography.

That is, until an extraordinarily brutal final chapter that explains some of the minor mysteries and clues littered throughout, notably Lavender’s ever-present journal references to Sam being “home late”. To explain this fully would require a spoiler alert, but the ending reveals Party Animals to be more than just a revealing memoir, but, hopefully, Mr Aaronovitch’s catharsis.

Party Animals: My Party and Other Communists, by David Aaronovitch. Jonathan Cape, £17.99