played in forging the leadership of Syriza. “The new Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who studied Economics, and the new Syriza MP for Corfu, Fotini Vaki, are both Essex alumni. So is Rena Dourou, the prefect (or governor) of Athens,” he wrote. Dourou’s “MA course was inspired by the late Professor Ernesto Laclau, a political exile from Argentina.”

There is no way to quantify the extent to which Varoufakis was familiar with Laclau’s works repudiating Marxist economics and the primacy of the class struggle. But he was undoubtedly influenced by the broader political conceptions with which Laclau and the Essex faculty was associated and which was represented politically by Marxism Today. It was in its pages that the ideological framework for what was to become New Labour was first laidseven years and was Minister of State for Trade and Industry during the strike.

In 2013, secret documents came to light detailing how, in October 1982, officials in Whitehall warned that stocks of coal at power stations would run out just nine weeks into a major strike by miners. A committee codenamed MISC 57, formed to plan for the closure of “uneconomic” pits and a national miners’ strike, sent a memo to Thatcher recommending the use of the military. Based on this, then Energy Secretary Lawson wrote a memo for Thatcher in January 1983 setting out a detailed strategy to defeat the NUM in the event of a strike. He later described these preparations as “like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler.”

Writing on his blog of his relations