When Andrew Marr had a voice: The Flett-Marr correspondence
Andrew Marr has quit the BBC to become a presenter on LBC and ‘find his voice’. I’m not sure what voice he now has but 25 years ago it was on the left. That might well surprise many who know him only for a more recent period.
His Wiki entry suggests that as a student he was both a Maoist and a supporter of the broadly Trotskyist AWL. Anyone who knows the left will grasp that holding the two positions at once would require some difficult ideological contortions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr
In fact it’s probably likely that he was at least loosely associated with the AWL.
Certainly when he was Editor of The Independent (1996-98) we had engagements from time to time on matters of the left. One example is below. However it would seem that as Bob Dylan noted, Things Have Changed
Letter: Baffled by 1917? Just ask Trotsky
Keith Flett
The Independent Thursday 27 March 1997 00:02
Sir: As a research historian I am very much in favour of Andrew Marr’s suggestion that we “should honour the people in disorganised archives who burrow through individual life stories” (“Makers of their own tragedy”, 26 March). I am less happy however at his implication that Orlando Figes has somehow written the history of the Russian Revolution according to Tony Blair.
What Figes has done is to uncover a number of interesting new details about the revolution while adding very little to our overall understanding of it. This is mainly because Figes, focusing on what the Russian people themselves did, misses the huge significance of the Western attack on the revolution from 1918. The revolution survived, but most of those who made it were killed in the misnamed Civil War with the White armies.
For a general understanding of 1917 and after, John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution remain by far the best guides. To these it is the task of the research historian, I’m afraid, merely to add footnotes of qualification or embellishment.
KEITH FLETT
Convenor, London Socialist Historians Group
London N17
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