TODAY family, friends and comrades of the Morning Star’s arts editor Cliff Cocker will give this giant of our paper the sendoff he merits — and party as he asked us to in a last request.

Cliff’s revolutionary life was so varied and action-packed that hardly anyone knows the full story. One result is that Morning Star readers will have to wait for a more comprehensive tribute — friends and loved ones are still exchanging the memories that will form the whole.

He grew up in Liverpool, raised by communist parents, and remained a proud Communist Party member until his death. 

With comedian Alexei Sayle he cut his teeth in the theatre world at the Liverpool Youth Theatre and later co-wrote sketches for the Threepenny Theatre, touring pubs and working men’s clubs.

In the 1970s he lived in Paris with wife Mary, staging plays, teaching English to factory workers and selling the French communist newspaper l’Humanité.

Cliff’s engagement with the Fete de l’Humanité, the huge Paris annual cultural and political jamboree organised by the paper, dated back to those days and it was with Mary again that in 2015 he edited the first ever French edition of the Morning Star, an all-French language paper celebrating the rise of Jeremy Corbyn which was handed out at the Fete that year. 

From 1984 to 1987 he would live and work in Ethiopia with Mary and the children, teaching theatre studies in Addis Ababa during the country’s revolutionary period, back in Britain as an editor at Soviet Weekly and finally of course at the Morning Star.

He joined the paper in 2009, became arts editor in 2010 and worked tirelessly to expand, improve and promote our cultural coverage from then until the day he died.

Cliff insisted on working throughout his illness, taking just a few months off for chemotherapy last autumn after being diagnosed with lung cancer and always downplaying how ill he was. 

Though we have worked remotely since March 2020, he kept attending our news meetings on Skype and as before his contributions combined an artistic education with a dash of wit.

A shame of not being in the office was missing his barbed humour, his Liverpool-fanatic trolling of our former sports editor Kadeem and wry one-liner interjections into newsroom discussions that often saw them dissolve into general laughter. 

Cliff was dedicated to the Morning Star — not just working for the paper but helping to organise fundraisers and promotional events in his own time, participating in our annual general meetings as a shareholder and always on the lookout for new contributors and new allies who would make our arts coverage even better and open new doors. 

He cared passionately about the paper and had strong opinions on everything about it — leading to sometimes rather heated discussions in the editor’s office or the pub.

At the same time he was a great support, going out of his way to help, assist and advise colleagues whenever it was needed.

Tributes have poured in from contributors who appreciated his encouragement and assistance, his determination that there be a platform in the media for a serious socialist approach to the arts, “our own space for thinking about our art, and our own infrastructure for bringing people together and pulling people in,” in the words of one of the many who worked with him in this role. 

No-one could deny that he left the Morning Star’s arts section far richer than he found it, and I know he had still bigger plans for its expansion which he was enthusiastically discussing with me just weeks ago. His will be big shoes to fill.

Red salute, comrade: the Morning Star will not forget you.