Except that the rage against them didn’t come from the Labour ‘right’, a political force which ceased to exist about 25 years ago when the SDP defected and mandatory reselection was introduced. (There is now one actual ‘right-wing’ Labour MP, John Spellar, who ought by rights to be in a museum). It came from the practical power-seeking Labour left establishment which seized control of the party after the defeat of the Trotskyists and Bennites by the Eurocommunist left (ludicrously characterised by Fleet Street as ‘the right’) in the early 1980s. As a conservative, I have little passion to spare on Mr Galloway or Mr Crow, whom I know to be politically negligible forces. The Labour elite fear and loathe them because they might remind poorly-informed people of what sort of movement Labour actually is, in ways they can easily understand. Most conservatives rather like Tony Benn. Most Labour establishment figures despise him with a furious resentful passion, blaming him for extending their years out of office. So not disingenuous at all, just based on a clearer and better informed understanding of politics and the Labour Party than Mr Finn (or I suspect many BBC persons) possesses.