SPOOKS intercepted Labour Party chairman Harold Laski’s private correspondence during the 1930s and ’40s in a bid to expose his links to the Communist Party.

Files released today show that MI5 intercepted Laski’s private letters from 1930 until his death in 1950 aged 56 — despite an MI5 report to the Home Office as early as 1930 saying he was “not a communist.”

Laski was a prominent Labour leftwinger, who chaired the party during its landslide election victory in 1945, having moved towards Marxism during the extreme economic hardship that engulfed Britain in the 1930s.