Bob Marshall-Andrews

Bob Marshall-Andrews, MP for Medway and a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, lived in the same Bristol University hall of residence as me (though 25 years earlier) - Wills Hall, founded by the Bristolian tobacco magnates of the same name when they had a huff because their son didn't get into Oxford.

Aside from shared residence of a 1930s pastiche version of a Tudor Oxford College

which softened the blow of not getting into the real thing, I assumed we had nothing else in common.

But in an exclusive interview in the 2007 Wills Hall Association Handbook, battling Bob reveals his Trot-fighting past:

"I joined the Party in 1971 and stood for Parliament in 1974 in Richmond ... At that stage, the Party went walk-about - it was heavily infiltrated with Trots and it became almost impossible for someone like me to get a seat. I was on the shortlist for Battersea South in 1976. The first question - after I'd made what I thought was a passable left-wing pitch - was from a man with a Che Guevara moustache, who stood up and said "What's a middle class w**ker like you think you can do for the people of Battersea South?"

It became very dull, I spent my entire life fighting Trots."

He then reveals that Neil Kinnock persuaded him (at a rugby match) to get back into politics. Except by this time his politics had changed a bit. Thanks Neil.