He was also member of the Political Purposes Committee of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society for many years and, for a while, even the vice-chair, a unique position to be in for a Labour Party-affiliated mass organisation.

Yet, although it is possible to discern a cumulative build-up of views held by French that significantly distanced him from the mainstream within the Communist Party from at least around 1962, it would take another 15 years for this to formally take the form of an organisational breach.

It might be thought that his role as the lead political worker in the Surrey District of the CPGB clearly enabled him to maintain a semi-detached position within it.

His Surrey District began to operate as a factional entity within the Young Communist League, which was much more destabilised by differences over the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 than the CPGB.

The fact that much of this leadership delighted in anti-Soviet rhetoric contrasted starkly with French and those around him who were especially associated with a relatively uncritical stance regarding the Soviet Union and its policies.

The Surrey District took the adoption of the programme as a signal for a breakaway, which had been mooted to have the sympathy of several thousand CPGB members, although only several hundred in actuality joined the New Communist Party of Britain (NCP)[5] when it was founded on 15 July 1977.

It was clearly a personal achievement of sorts for French, though others would point to the manner in which Marxist thinkers in the CPGB and YCL now began to be targeted heavily by Eurocommunists.