During an item about dictators on Thursday's This Week programme on BBC1, Diana Abbott surprised both Portillo and Neil by claiming that on balance, Mao Tse Tung did more good than bad.
Mao, let's remember, was responsible for the peacetime deaths of between 30 and 60 million.
If somebody had declared on the programme that, well, at least Hitler made the trains run on time, he would have been rightly blasted off the sofa. But Abbott has escaped any great censure largely because the comment went under the media radar, possibly because too many producers and journalists are ignorant on the subject, or think that that their audience is. Perhaps they should all be forced to read Yung Cheng's recent biography of the great man.
Abbott is a ridiculous figure, but that doesn't alter the fact that her comment was disgusting. She should at the very least be censured by the Labour party.
But it was also revealing. Despite the work of such figures as the great historian Robert Conquest, the monsters of communism have continued to get off astonishingly lightly.
Some of this must be due to their absence in the West's popular culture. Have you ever seen a film about the terror of Stalin, which resulted in the death of upwards of thirty million? Or a mini-series set during Mao's cultural revolution? Has a film set in the Russian gulag ever won an Oscar? Has there even been such a film?
Do school pupils ever study Stalin and the Red Terror, or Mass Murder under Communism as a special subject, in the same way that they quite rightly learn about the Nazi holocaust and slavery? Do a quick poll of kids on any high street and you will find that most of them do not even know the names.
Perhaps people like Abbott like it that way.
