Sir Keir Starmer has been quick to condemn Nigel Farage over alleged racist comments at school, but a Mail on Sunday investigation reveals the Prime Minister's own youthful hard-Left activities, including a magazine backed by a Marxist group and a trip to a KGB-monitored camp in Czechoslovakia.
In 1986, Starmer and friends launched Socialist Alternatives, a magazine funded by the Paris-based International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, a faction known as Pabloists. The publication campaigned for the release of a convicted Marxist terror chief, raising questions about whether it was unwittingly used by KGB propaganda.
That same year, Starmer visited Czechoslovakia for a work camp restoring a Nazi atrocity memorial. Declassified files show such camps were part of StB operations to identify and potentially recruit young high-fliers to undermine Nato. Security experts call this youthful naivety, but it adds to a pattern of hard-Left associations Starmer has rarely discussed.
Starmer, who built his election campaign on a working-class upbringing in Oxted, has been quiet about his postgraduate years at Oxford and as a trainee barrister. The revelations come as Labour faces scrutiny over its own past, with Starmer now leading attacks on Farage's schoolboy behaviour.
