In the annals of British political history, the image of Labour leader Neil Kinnock denouncing the “grotesque chaos” of Liverpool’s local government at his party’s conference in 1985 looms large. According to official memory, this was the moment when Kinnock asserted himself over the hard left, specifically the Trotskyist Militant tendency, whose sectarian antics had subordinated the city’s real needs to ideological dogma.

The speech, delivered in the seaside town of Bournemouth, has acquired a cult status, at least for devotees of British political history. This includes even conservative commentators like Simon Heffer, who included Kinnock’s attack on Militant in his anthology The Great British Speeches. When Keir Starmer railed against Nigel Farage at last year’s Labour conference, one of his supporters could think of no finer praise than to compare it to Kinnock’s intervention four decades earlier.

But Kinnock’s version of events obscures a far more complex and interesting story. While the Militant tendency was certainly an influential force in Liverpool’s Labour Party, it was one part of a wider left-wing movement. Fewer than a third of the Liverpool councilors who were ready to defy Margaret Thatcher’s government in the mid-1980s actually belonged to Militant.