David himself went up to Balliol in 1973 but dropped out after a term — just enough time for him to formally join the Communists himself. He remained in the party until 1987, aged 33 — although he says he left it “in his head” in 1980. His decision to leave the party was not taken for noble reasons, He had just taken a job as an editor of a BBC politics programme and was told that he would have to resign from the party. “They couldn’t really be doing with the adverse publicity if a paper like the Daily Mail discovered that I was still a Commie.” The decision to leave did not go down well with his mother.

Party Animals deals very honestly with the moral blindness that those who remained in the party had to adopt. David shows how various members — including some close to the Aaronovitch family — had spied for the Soviets, yet could still muster outrage that they were on occasions spied upon by the British state. The crimes of Communism were somehow overlooked — moral outrage over South Africa would overcome any amount of Soviet wrongdoing.

Party Animals is, however, less a book about politics than a memoir of the peculiarities of a Communist upbringing. David’s childhood comes across as fairly miserable, but, he writes, “If my childhood was not much fun it had nothing to do with the Party.”

He says of his mother, “I feared and mistrusted her and she clearly — but conflictedly — did not like me.” Of his father he says, “I think Sam might have liked me had he taken the time.”

Perhaps it does have something to do with the party — or rather with people who would so devote themselves to a cause to which all else, including their son, came second.