One of the pleasures of Mitchell’s memoir comes from the very different culture of the near past, an era both joltingly familiar and impossibly foreign. Mitchell’s own leftward evolution is spurred by a certain Rupert Murdoch, presented in the early chapters not in his customary role as billionaire tyrant but rather as the youthful representative of new anti-Establishment journalism. Mitchell, who had begun his career as a journalist in Townsville, quickly moved to the Mount Isa Mail, specifically to join Rupert’s stable, which boasted a proprietor who campaigned against capital punishment, endorsed a republic, printed posters for Richard Neville’s Oz magazine, and generally opened the stuffy newspaper world to the nascent counterculture.

After various boozy escapades in Sydney, Mitchell went to London, where he worked on the Sunday Times. As an investigative journalist, he wrote about Robert Maxwell and Scientology; Uganda and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (‘I didn’t think much of his politics in 1968 and I think even less of them now’).

Most of the dreary curmudgeons now ensconced in Australia’s commentariat went through their brief radical phase during the Vietnam years: let us not forget that in 1967 Keith Windschuttle, that most unlikely flower child, was publishing LSD recipes in Honi Soit. Mitchell’s story is different. In 1971 he joined the editorial team for Workers Press, the official organ of the Socialist Labor League (SLL), Britain’s largest Trotskyist group. This was not the conventional youthful flirtation with Marxism: Mitchell was abandoning an established and lucrative broadcasting career to work for little money on a paper that printed only 1200 copies an edition. But Trotskyism offered an elegant explanation for the degeneration of the Soviet Union and for the pusillanimity of its satellite parties. The SLL had recruited many former communists disillusioned by events in Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the midst of the counterculture, it argued for a classical Marxism, oriented to the trade unions and to the labour movement.

The SLL proved surprisingly attractive to intellectuals, particularly in the arts. One of playwright Trevor Griffiths’s lesser known works, The Party, depicts SLL leader Gerry Healy (originally played by Laurence Olivier, no less) exhorting wavering parlour radicals to commit to socialism. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were Healy’s most famous celebrity recruits, but there were many others: director Ken Loach’s career owes much to the years he and his long-time collaborator Jim Allen spent in the group. The SLL could call upon support or endorsements from luminaries such as Judi Dench, Glenda Jackson, Marty Feldman, Helen Mirren, Spike Milligan, and Michael Parkinson. Here, Mitchell nicely captures the group’s attraction:

I had ridden the boundaries at the Sunday Times and Granada Television and experienced at first hand the limitations of bourgeois journalism. I was sick of the organised hypocrisy that surrounded the ‘freedom of the press’, the ‘objectivity’ of news which was little more than dressed-up political and cultural propaganda, and ‘independent’ commentators who wrote slavishly on behalf of powerful vested interests. It seemed to me that if you wanted to be taken seriously, then it was time to do something serious.

Such was the SLL’s appeal: a theoretical and political intensity that contrasted with the self-indulgent gesture politics common in the New Left.

Healy, although not physically prepossessing (Brian Behan, another one-time member, described him as having ‘the sore eyes of a newborn pig’), was a feisty orator, capable of inspiring extraordinary devotion among his members and with the indomitable will necessary to hold together a fringe organisation in difficult circumstances. Yet his single-mindedness had a darker side. In Tariq Ali’s satirical novel Redemption (1990), Healy features as the thuggish Frank Hood, leader of the Hoodlums. The name was chosen advisedly. The SLL and its successor, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), were known for their ferocious hostility toward rivals and for the intolerable demands they placed on their cadre.

The paper Mitchell edited appeared daily, an impossibly ambitious undertaking for an organisation of a few thousand people, and symptomatic of Healy’s tendency to act as if the mass party that he craved already existed. The members were spurred on by apocalyptic assessments of the political situation: Healy was much given to predictions of fascism and economic collapse.

As the radicalisation of the 1970s waned, the Healy group became progressively unmoored from reality. What is most surprising about Come the Revolution is how little distance Mitchell has, even now, from some of the WRP’s more demented antics. He recounts, for instance, his role in Healy’s notorious efforts to link a rival socialist group to the murder of Trotsky, and recalls purchasing Lev Davidovich’s death mask on the basis that the morbid object would ‘rouse the working class to emulate Trotsky’s struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution’.

Then there were the negotiations that Mitchell and Vanessa Redgrave conducted on Healy’s behalf with various dictatorships. ‘We had become,’ he boasts, on smuggling Libyan cash into London, ‘Colonel Gaddafi’s revolutionary party in Britain.’ The shenanigans with various Middle Eastern despots – Mitchell also met Saddam Hussein, whom Healy greatly admired – were partly spurred by the demands of the Healyites’ bloated infrastructure.

Yet the WRP’s eventual collapse centred on sex (money – or rather, the lack of it – played a part too). In 1985 twenty-six female members accused Healy of sexual assault, sending the organisation into protracted and ultimately terminal crisis. In the split that followed, Mitchell, like Vanessa Redgrave, remained loyal to Healy. His account of this schism does him no credit. He still queries the women’s allegations of abuse. Why didn’t they, he wonders, simply knee Healy in the balls? It is a remarkably insensitive response, given his own confessed inability to stand up to Healy’s rages, even when the man was spouting self-evident gibberish. As Mitchell makes perfectly evident, none of the Healyites could refuse their leader anything.

After the WRP’s demise, Mitchell returned to Australia and renewed his career as a mainstream journalist. Yet he retains a loyalty to his past that manifests itself in a splendid contempt for Establishment reporters.

‘The next time you meet them,’ he writes of journalists joining today’s Murdoch empire, ‘they have two tiny holes drilled in their necks, their eyes are dead and they have begun writing trash labeled “Exclusive”’.

Mitchell’s lingering Healyism produces an oddly apolitical assessment of his former associates. Healy, he says, was ‘politically assassinated with the same callous cruelty employed by those who had conspired to drive an icepick into Trotsky’s brain’ – a preposterous comparison. Exactly how did the group go so badly off the rails? What turned a vibrant socialist organisation of talented and committed people into an unpleasant political cult that discredited socialism for so many? What might have been done differently? Come the Revolution offers no real answers.

Nonetheless, few Australian journalists would be brave enough to end their memoirs with a denunciation of the market and a call for revolution. If this memoir does not fully explain the Healy phenomenon, it does provide a fascinating account of a movement that deserves more study.