But Cohen’s point still stands. I bridle at dim, of course. But “middle-class” and “sect” hit home. I left the SWP because I felt a fraud: a public schoolboy selling socialist newspapers outside the Haymarket Metro in Newcastle City Centre, imagining my ripped jeans and dyed hair put me at the vanguard of the proletariat. Mea culpa.

Over time, Christianity took its place — one “change the world” belief system replacing another. But for all its many failings, I suspect there will always remain in me some small sense of nostalgia for my Trotskyite phase. The world felt simpler back then.

A hundred years ago this summer, the Communist Party of Great Britain established its youth wing, the Young Communist League. Earlier this week, comedian Alexi Sayle and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen described their experiences of growing up within this all-encompassing belief system. Rosen remembers his mother linking her commitment to Communism to the growing threat of fascism in the 1930s; with Black shirts on the streets of the East End, Hitler’s rise in Germany and the Civil War in Spain. “Who else was going to defend us?” she asked.

Put this way, communism shares its basic question with protestant Christianity: “How are we saved?” Indeed, when considered experientially, Communism is much more like a salvation religion than a dry body of Marxist philosophical doctrine.

Yes, I remember endless arguments down the Student Bar about the precise relationship between the working class and the revolution, just as later I would argue with my friends about the way in which Jesus would inaugurate the Kingdom of God — all rather technical sounding stuff. And both arguments rapidly descended into heated debates on minor details of doctrine: the People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean’s People’s Front. But the existential punch of both belief systems is carried much more by something like the simplicity of Mrs Rosen’s question.

That question is also at the heart of Paul’s Mason’s forthcoming book, How to Stop Fascism — a fascinating study of how the hard Left continues to reinvent itself despite its numerous disappointments; the kingdom having evidently failed to come, and the supposed harbinger of that kingdom, the Soviet Union, having so clearly betrayed its higher calling, most obviously in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

But Mason also explores a much more interesting question: why did the Left in Germany not unite to counter the threat that was Hitler? Why did they not offer more spirited resistance to the rise of the Nazis? “Who else is going to defend us?” asked Mrs Rosen, encouraging her son to support the Communists. And yet they didn’t.

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Why? Partly, as Mason explains, because the Nazis didn’t fit the narrow Communist script of historical development. Its whole economic and class-based analysis was just too narrow a lens through which to recognise the full horror of what the Nazis were planning. Marxism’s failure was “its inability to grasp complexity”. For orthodox Marxism, just as with Christian eschatology, historical progress was unstoppable.

The arc of history was on their side, leading inevitably to the sunny uplands of peace and prosperity for all. The gas chambers were just not in the script. And as Hitler rose to power, too many Communists remained in their equivalent to the student bar, debating obscure points of doctrine. The communist leadership “sit in the tavern and carries on the fight against fascism [there]. Landlord, another pint …” as one communist remembered from his jail cell.

Mason’s fascinating book is a call for the Left to re-invent itself once again, in the face of a new form of fascism he sees in people like Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro. Of course, the hard Left has reinvented itself many times before. Following the Soviet invasion of Prague, many Communists became disillusioned with the Soviet focus and reinvented themselves as Euro Communists. They started reading Gramsci who proposed a more culturally sophisticated analysis of political power.

But Mason goes one step further. He proposes that Marxism has to learn the language of morality, and even — shock horror — the idea of a radical evil similar to that espoused by Christians. Marxism, he writes, “failed in the face of fascism because it had no explicit theory of evil, and when confronted with a systematic, militarised, genocidal anti-humanism, it could offer scant explanation.”

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This is a very long way from Marx, who remained highly suspicious of moral philosophy, and especially of anything that had the whiff of theology. If Gramsci brought about a cultural turn in Marxist theory, Mason is proposing a moral one.

Yet this book still feels a little too much like notes from the student bar. How to Stop Fascism does not mention Winston Churchill, for instance, except to condemn the far-Right racists who rallied in support of Churchill after his statue had been graffitied by Black Lives Matter activists. It’s a strange omission, given Churchill’s actions constituted one of the most obvious solutions to the How to Stop Fascism challenge. Similarly, Zionism is not even mentioned by the former young communists as a possible answer to Mrs Rosen’s question, though Israel was established as a response to precisely that fear. The Left do not have a monopoly on hating fascism.

And indeed, Mason is correct that it would be a mistake to dismiss of fascism as a dead duck. Mason’s definition of fascism — “the organised refusal of human life” — is cleverly pithy, though perhaps a little too broad to be meaningful or accurate. But as the recent hounding of BBC journalist Nick Watt demonstrated, the heightened emotions of street thuggery remain alive and well, and are being expressed disturbingly close to the centre of our democratic institutions — though the hard Left, including Mason himself, is no stranger to whipping up strong feelings on the streets. I am frightened by both, and by the way that both fascism and communism justify their emotional intensity with reference to the moral failings of the other.

One of the insights of salvation theology is that you can pretty much work out the shape of what that theology will be if you understand what it is that we are being told we need saving from. In Christian terms, some think we need saving from death, others from hell, or the devil, or sin or self-regard. Others think we need saving from our enemies.

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Mason thinks that we need saving from fascism and from the ethno-nationalism that underpins it — and his soteriology proceeds on that basis. It’s a kind of secular theology.

What Mason could also have mentioned is that Communism and the Abrahamic religions share a belief in iconoclasm — a statue-smashing instinct that refuses to allow the glorious richness of divine or human life to be ossified in stone statues or dollar bills. Religious people call it idolatry Marxists call it commodification.

The problem with statues is not that they sometimes glorify bad people. NO, they are a metaphor for the way some people can stop thinking or stop loving — they are a celebration of unreflective stasis, fixity, dead lifeless doctrine. Iconoclasm is a movement of renewal, with the need to display human love at its centre.

My Marxism is long dead. But I still can’t shake off the idea that I have more in common with communism than I feel comfortable with. Marxist theology is not just about lefty priests, but about disturbingly quasi-religious Marxists, too.

The progressive world has a long and ignoble history of downplaying sexual misconduct for the sake of “the cause”. One such incident nearly tore the Socialist Workers’ Party apart in 2013, long before #MeToo, when a senior party member was accused of rape.

The female accuser didn’t go to the police, because she believed that the party’s hostility to the thin blue line meant involving them would result in her expulsion from the party. Instead, the SWP handled the matter internally — and she was told the accused was suspended from the party and told him to read up on feminism.

A glance at the track record of prominent male feminists, though, suggests that this may not have helped. Being an outspoken male supporter of gender equality is no shield against accusations of improper behaviour.

Take, for example, former GQ political editor Rupert Myers, who berated men’s rights activists as “cave-dwelling idiots” for denying the existence of “rape culture”. Being a self-styled feminist was no defence against a social media mobbing, though. When allegations circulated online at the height of #MeToo about Myers’s sexual behaviour, prompting a Twitter pile-on, Myers ended up being fired by the magazine.

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Nor is he the only one: other male feminist journalists who faced #MeToo allegations included Sam Kriss and Vice’s Michael Hafford. Even the Ground Zero of #MeToo himself, Harvey Weinstein, complained in 2019 about how the accusations against him have “eviscerated” his pioneering work in gender equality.

This isn’t a purely #MeToo phenomenon either. During the GamerGate controversy of 2014, a number of male journalists spoke out in defence of women — more than 15 of whom have since been accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment and rape to consuming child pornography.

My aim here isn’t to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of every alleged misplaced hand, or ill-judged joke, so much as to wonder at this startling volume of “male feminists” at least alleged to be on the pervy side. Surely a commitment to feminism would have the opposite effect. Why, then, so many self-identified male feminists dogged by rumours of sexual misconduct?

Men’s rights activists might argue that in a climate where calls to “believe women” come thick and fast, even the most ambiguous situation can easily be weaponised to destroy a man’s career. Men accused of impropriety have claimed that the real motivation was politics — or simply a bad breakup.

To this the feminists might retort, following Mandy Rice-Davies, that they would say that, wouldn’t they. Everyone wants to believe the best about themselves, something that leads to what social psychology calls “moral licensing”. This concept argues that people justify ethically dodgy behaviour by referring to a past track record of virtue.

For example, one Stanford study showed that people who loudly proclaim anti-racist views are often, in practice, more racist than average. Are men who identify as feminist more prone to sexual misbehaviour because they imagine their political beliefs put them beyond reproach?

A radical feminist might reply, though, that imagining it’s merely self-deception is to misunderstand what feminism is. In this view, since patriarchy arranges men hierarchically over women, it’s impossible by definition for a male to be a feminist. Regardless of a man’s intentions, as long as patriarchy exists he’ll always be an oppressor; he will inevitably end up imposing his own patriarchal presumptions — and sometimes sexual attentions — when they’re not wanted.

But part of the difficulty is precisely in determining where sexual attentions might be wanted. There are, of course, clear-cut and inexcusable cases of rape and sexual assault. But some of the cases above provoked intense controversy precisely because the circumstances of the accusation were highly subject to (inevitably partisan) interpretation.

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And one under-discussed fact that complicates these controversies is that women do not, under every single circumstance, categorically hate men being sexually forward. In ‘BDSM’ circles, for example, numerous studies have shown that women are significantly more likely than men to fantasise about being dominated.

And enjoying male assertiveness isn’t just a kink among the whips-and-chains brigade. One study showed that 93% of women prefer to be asked out, rather than asking. Once in a relationship, too, a lack of male sexual initiative often makes women unhappy. Clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon, for example, describes how frequently female patients express frustration with male sexual partners who have learned that “to show respect to their female partners” they must “avoid at all costs any behaviour in the bedroom that may be regarded as aggressive or dominant”. In other words, male sexual initiative is often quite popular with women.

But not always. The same action might come across as deliciously confident in one context, but repulsively creepy in another. And the sheer volume of #MeToo accusations suggests something has gone very wrong how men and women assess which is which.

The institutional takeaway from #MeToo seems to have been that the solution to such unhappy encounters is more feminism, more consent and more bureaucracy for punishing people who get the context wrong. But if in fact women quite like at least a measure of male sexual initiative, provided it’s in the right context, then we may need not less aggression but better guidelines on context.

And here we face the troubling possibility that all these handsy male feminists weren’t overly forward because they were doing liberal feminism wrong, but because they took its lessons too literally.

For core among these lessons is the idea that men and women are basically the same apart from our dangly bits. As the quintessential liberal pop-feminist (and UN feminist advocate) actress Emma Watson put it: feminism is “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” It is, Watson tells us, “about giving women choice […] It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation. It’s about equality.”

And yet however loudly we bang the drum for equality, there remain some clear and well-documented differences between the sexes. Perhaps, as this UN Women training booklet does, this is a consequence of sexist male socialisation. But a simpler explanation is that humans are, while capable of rationality, also evolved animals — and that this translates to some normative differences in attitude and behaviour. For example, males commit 90% of all sexual assaults, and almost all violent crime.

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Of course, suggesting male aggression (including sexual aggression) may have some basis in evolution isn’t to argue it’s always good. But it is to argue that education is unlikely to get rid of it entirely. And if this is true, the core reason there are so many male feminist sex pests may simply be because they’re male. No amount of feminist “education” will alter this basic fact — even if women wanted to, which (at least according to Dr Marianne Brandon) is by no means universally the case.

If anything, sending a lechy male feminist off to read liberal feminism, like the SWP did, may make matters worse — for doing so will entrench the belief that differences between the sexes are pure social constructs. And a man who’s signed up to this worldview has no reason to imagine his sexual desires differ in any way from those of a woman he finds attractive. We are, he might point out, totally over the sexist stereotypes of women as pure vestal virgins — aren’t we?

This belief that men and women are essentially the same leaves both sexes chronically at risk of misunderstanding human sexuality. A measure of male sexual aggression is neither entirely a social construct nor wholly curable via education. It has a biological substrate. And it’s not even undesirable to women, provided it’s in the right context. But managing it takes a measure of realism, compromise and — sometimes — a willingness to adopt social norms that treat the sexes differently.

This is anathema to the liberal feminist doctrine of sameness, a worldview so committed to ignoring any biological element to sex differences it’s bound to leave men ill-equipped to recognise and restrain their own sexual aggression. And on the other side, this doctrine of sameness leaves women shorn of social strategies for evading that aggression, leading to the (anecdotally common) phenomenon of women consenting to unwanted sex largely out of politeness. And it’s somewhere in this murky territory, I suspect, that many of the most controversial accusations of impropriety occur.

Then both sexes, wounded and perplexed as to what has gone wrong on the battlefield of intimacy, turn to supposedly neutral but in fact highly politicised procedures and pseudo-legal means of redress, in the hope that someone can adjudicate on who was right and who wrong. No one ever stops to wonder if part of the problem is that everyone is working off faulty assumptions.

What is to be done? At least if internet gossip is to be believed, teaching men to be feminists isn’t doing the trick. But contra received opinion, we may not help matters either by trying to demolish sexist stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Instead, if we’re to navigate our differences honestly in the interests of intimacy, we may need a feminist project to resurrect them.

The guessing game began. Their clothes didn’t scream Socialist Worker Party. So what were they protesting? Who were these children, and what did they need saving from? The Bedroom Tax? Black Lives Not Mattering? Turkey Twizzlers?

As we crowded into Trafalgar Square the answer became obvious: satanic paedophile cults.

There, a crowd of true believers were gathering for the grand jamboree of dissent that was the Unite For Freedom Rally. I had accidentally stumbled into the conspiracy theory motherlode. There were many more QAnon posters — the particular creed that these two were devoted to. But there were also posters that advertised Bill Gates’s largely unrelated attempts to depopulate the West. Then the vaguely related but far more established anti-vaxxers. Then the ultra-modern 5G types. A man in a cut-out face visor held a garish folk art poster with more orthodox anti-Semitic Rothschild tropes, even as more milquetoast libertarians used their posters to assert only that “masks are muzzles” and “new normal = new fascism”. Finally, there was a single placard, perhaps designed to unite these disparate sub-tribes under a single belief system. It said only: “SCAM”.

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The Unite For Freedom Rally had been advertised online as aiming for ‘an end to Government lies and the restoration of all freedoms’, but its remit went far wider than that, because its organiser was Kate Shemirani.

In recent weeks, Shemirani has emerged as the leader of Britain’s anti-Covid conspiracists. The quickest way into her belief system is to note that she refused chemotherapy for breast cancer on the advice of a husband who thought 9/11 was an inside job, then embarked on: “a fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free vegan regime including high doses of vitamins as well as 13 juices a day, five coffee enemas and mistletoe injected into her stomach”. Anti-vax is her strong suit, but you name it and Shemirani will believe it.

So why was she teaming up with Dolores Cahill? Cahill is a doctor and a professor from University College Dublin. She’s a world expert in biomarker discovery and diagnostics; you can’t say that about people who squirt mistletoe into their tummies.

Cahill was one of the early speakers. She believes we’ve over-egged the lethality of coronavirus (perfectly reasonable), and also that vaccines carry safety risks (debatable, but she has the scientific chops to make a case). Just upstream of her, the day’s first speaker quoted nothing more noxious than Karol Sikora and Carl Heneghan, putting a mainstream case that anyone locked down with Toby Young would know only too well.

Yet just 20 minutes later David Icke was onstage, joining all imaginable dots as he hammered his emetic catchphrase: “People of England get off your knees, the lion sleeps no more.”

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Many conspiracy theories are already negations of other conspiracy theories. Is it a necessary or merely a sufficient condition to believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the Western world, in order to believe that a New Jersey pizza parlour is a global hub for the dial-out molestation of children?

If Dolores Cahill believes that vaccines containing aluminium risk long-term toxicity if injected intra-muscularly, how does this square with Shemirani’s view: that they are full of microchips bearing ‘Darpa thought-monitoring agents’? Curiously, no one seemed interested in debating anyone else’s view. The crowd cheered everything.

‘Sharing a platform’ is a peculiar modern fallacy — a kind of lo-res conspiracy theory in itself about how ‘wings’ in politics work. But there’s also something quite strange about the bland pax that prevails here. In the world of deep belief, it seems all are welcome, more belief is always better, and nothing is ever contradictory so long as it pushes against power. It’s like one of those pan-faith conferences beloved of CofE bishops and Prince Charles. I do Buddha. You do Allah. They do Yoga. But — hey man — we all worship the same spiritual dimension.

Are conspiracy theories on the Left or on the Right of politics? Only their targets give it away. Inside the horseshoe, a hatred of the shadowy ‘Elites’ invokes both a libertarian desire to live freely and a leftist desire to topple power hierarchies. The sleight of hand that resolves the paradox is that no one is ever required to define what comes after the Elites are toppled.

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One reason for the present boom times for the likes of Shemirani is an age-old one: in times of trial we turn to faith. Another is more specific: the spectrum between conspiracy and truth is as blurred as it’s ever been.

The present moment seems designed to test the premise that Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing tried to write into our culture: that madness itself is a social construct, and a rational response to an insane society. Glaring contradictions in plain view are a force multiplier to the paranoid. In normal times, those contradictions are hidden by the sheer imposing gloss of an advanced society.

Yet anyone who has participated in the past few weeks of British life will be able to stick at least one finger in the gap between appearance and reality. Is it terribly surprising that some will also give it a wiggle?

Every day we are being asked to participate in what amounts to hygiene theatre. Never mind the rule of six, witness the contradiction between wearing masks in the queue for your coffee, and not when sat down right next to the queue. Witness the perspex shield between you and the barista. Then watch agog as the same server calmly places a receipt into your hand. It only takes a few seconds of googling to learn that a covid particle is 0.125 microns across, while a high-end N95 mask protects only against particles 3 microns or bigger. The size difference between a football and a goal.

Those who study conspiracy theories point out that they are seldom based on nothing. Normally, a kernel of jarring truth is exagerrated, kneaded, worked on. In the world of QAnon, that process of growing the dough even has a name: ‘baking’.

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It’s not much of a conspiracy to say that day-to-day, we are often asked to practise folk epidemiology to avoid frightening the horses. My mask doesn’t so much protect you as it protects some semi-imagined other who would be too scared to go onto a packed tube carriage without an implement that only months ago the WHO said didn’t work.

So where exactly is line between frightened horses and the ‘scared sheeple’ prominent on so many Unite For Freedom posters? The paranoid already see life as one big psyops game. In the Covid age, government sees it as one big Nudge Unit. Is that much of a difference?

Some of the sheer arbitrariness involved in Covid rules is unavoidable. Other bits are merely the voice of a government that has learned to speak in an infantilising tone. But both implicitly force the mainstream to cede ground to the nutters, to reveal that they may have some small, limited point. Around that tiny reef of truth, the barnacles of Q and Anti-Vax and Gates and 5G are attaching themselves.

After the Iraq War, the fallout from Alastair Campbell’s 45 minute dossier disintegrated our belief in what ‘they’ were telling us as foreign policy. Covid is rapidly turning into a home front version. The bourgeois conspiracy Iraq unleashed: “It’s all about oil”, is not too far from the Covid libertarian one: “It’s all about control.” Both feed more feral versions: “It’s all about Israel,” and “It’s all about mind control.”

This week, the Australian state of Victoria witnessed yet another extraordinary act of police overreach: footage of cops stomping on a mentally ill man’s head, after running him down in their car, for what seems to be little more than the crime of breaking curfew.

Rather than shrink in shame, the state’s premier, Dan Andrews, used his news conference to justify their actions with a shrug. “Much of this, sorry, all of it can be avoided,” he told the press, “if people don’t protest.” What paranoia is unjustified in the face of Andrews’ statement? What part of V For Vendetta is still science fiction? Who’s the real nutter here?

Between Il Duce Dan in the real world, and the vile fantasies of QAnon online: that’s the narrow ledge of sanity on which we must all perch.