How would Vicky, the greatest cartoonist in the history of the New Statesman, have drawn Jeremy Corbyn? I guess as a Jacobin in the French Revolution. There is a good reason for thinking this.

The fear within the Labour Party of revolution from the Left is as old as the Labour Party itself. At times it has been paranoid, like when Michael Foot, Richard Crossman, Tom Driberg and others founded the Keep Left group in 1947. Paranoid then, yes, though four years later when Keep Left became the Bevanites, the leftists did split the Party and the result contributed to fourteen years in opposition.

The resonance of the Keep Left revolt to the Corbynistas today echoes through a New Statesman publication Let Cowards Flinch, published by the long defunct Turnstile Press in 1947. It’s a satire in rhyming couplets that compares the Keep Left rebels with the Jacobins who seized power in the French Revolution in 1793. It was written by Olga Miller under the pseudonym of Sagittarius but it’s historic value is as much due to the cartoons of Vicky…………