Eric Pickles read Marx and Trotsky as youth (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Eric Pickles read Marx and Trotsky as youth

9:54am Sunday 22nd November 2009

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(10)

ONGAR MP Eric Pickles has revealed a background as a communist sympathiser.

The Tory MP, who is Conservative party chairman, speaks out on Radio 4 documentary The '89 Generation about his youth as an admirer of Trotsky and Marx.

He tells the program how he read the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, as a teenager only changing his views on left-wing politics after the Soviet Union's invasion of Alexander Dubcek's Czechoslovakia in the 60s.

He says on the program: “I was 16 years old in 1968 when Dubcek’s Spring was crushed. I was very interested in Dubcek and thought it was the natural evolution of communism. So I felt a tremendous shock when the tanks rolled into Prague.

“I thought: ‘What’s the most outrageous thing I can do to protest? I know, I’ll join the Conservative party’.”

After 40 years as a Tory, Mr Pickles, 57, added there was no danger of his returning to his left-wing youth.

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(10)