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"Lord" Triesman (May 14) boasts of loathing Trotskyists (the people not the doctrine). Perhaps that is why he quit Labour in 1970 to spend seven years in the Communist Party. At that time, the Communist Party was still vigorously defending the Moscow trials and the murder of Trotsky and many of the Old Bolsheviks under Stalin.

Maybe it was the waning of the Communist Party's enthusiasm for defending Stalin's crimes that eventually led Triesman back to the Labour Party. Or was the Communist Party just a way station on his successful pursuit of what Marx used to call "place and pelf"?

John Spencer
London