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This type of wry evangelicalism was about as close to later English Puritanism as Italian eurocommunism would be to the clunking fist of Stalinism.

In the CPGB, Eurocommunism began to amass momentum and influence, and just before the party congress of 1977, Jacques was approached by the party’s general secretary, Gordon McLennan – a representative of what Jacques characterises as the Communist party’s “centre ground”, whose politics were dutiful and dull, rather than sharply ideological.

Gramsci’s devotees now looked not to the USSR, but Italy, where the national Communist party was blazing a trail for the open, nuanced and self-consciously “Gramscian” politics increasingly known as Eurocommunism.

In the 1960s he engineered the expulsion and subsequent personal hounding of Fernando Claudín and Jorge Semprún, two Politbureau members whose “error” was to adopt what became Eurocommunism a decade before he chose it himself.

Out went a lifetime’s slavish subjection to Moscow in favour of moderate, social-democratic “Eurocommunism”.