In the 1980s, Peter Taaffe, who has died aged 83, was famous in political circles, and Labour party grandees shivered at the sound of his name.
As leader since 1964 of the Militant tendency, which, unlike other Trotskyist groups, wanted to work within the Labour party, Taaffe had spent two decades shaping and implementing a policy of “entryism”, in which Militant members were to take over the party from the ground up.
