Described as a cult leader, attack dog for a foreign government, and contrarian, Frank Furedi used to be one of the foremost communists in the country in the 70s and 80s.

Now, he lives in an unassuming Faversham townhouse, backs Brexit, rails against “woke” politics, and works for a Brussels-based think tank – so we sat down to hear about his life and times…

“I haven't got very much time to run a cult,” says Frank Furedi in the office of his Faversham house.

“Everybody that knows me knows that I'm the opposite because I'm a very private person.”

Private or not, Mr Furedi has a very public presence. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, though he says he never gets to Canterbury anymore as he’s busy with other things.

He is in charge of a think tank called MCC Brussels which is based in the Belgium capital.

It is closely linked to the right-wing Hungarian government and Mr Furedi has been labelled “the godfather of the cult”.

Sleepy Faversham has been his home for about 20 years after working at the University of Kent for decades. At first he “didn't think very much” of our county, he says.

“Kent was not the centre of intellectual life, and also at the time Canterbury wasn't like what it is now, it was much more quiet and sort of reserved.

“But then in a funny kind of way, I began to fall in love with Kent. I don't know why, or what happened, but I began to like the local people. And I did a lot of walking so I really enjoyed the countryside, I still do, my wife and I go walking all the time.

“I realised that this was a very nice place, particularly for me because I was doing a lot of high-pressure stuff, that this was a really good place to wind down and get on with life.”

His hallway bears posters of philosophers Georg Lukacs and Hannah Arendt, and his office is littered with books and papers - aged Marxist tomes with well-worn spines to photocopied contemporary research papers. Twitter is open on his laptop.

Nearer to his desk, and betraying a preoccupation of his, a copy of “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” by Helen Joyce protrudes from one of several floor-to-ceiling shelves.

“Today, I think it's all with the culture wars, nothing else matters” he says earnestly. The Hungarian-Canadian academic has written almost 30 books, cranking them out with industrial efficiency. They aren’t pithily named and carry the hulking subtitles common to modern pop-political writing.

‘The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History’ is his most recent book. When he entered political life in the 1970s, his work was less Waterstones new releases table and more roadside stand at a demonstration.

Mr Furedi was the first chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), founded in 1978 after a succession of People’s Front of Judea-style splits over theoretical minutia which started in the International Socialists.

The RCP arose from the tangle of limbs and literature as a fringe, disciplined and contrarian front, even compared to their Trotskyist contemporaries. Living Marxism magazine, which persisted as LM after the party wound-up in the 90s, was sued out of existence by ITN for libel after claiming in 1997 they had “faked” pictures of Bosnians interned in a Serbian-run camp in Yugoslavia.

Before their tussle with the law, Living Marxism is a catalogue of the radical positions of which Mr Furedi was the primary architect. They interviewed Gerry Adams at the height of the troubles hailing him as “the man they tried to ban,” and called Margaret Thatcher the “dictator in Downing Street.”

Many members of the RCP, including Furedi himself, adopted and wrote under fake names, fearing police surveillance and conflict with others on the political fringes.

Paranoia doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you. Evidence provided to the Undercover Policing Inquiry shows Special Branch paying close attention to Furedi and his comrades, infiltrating meetings and describing them as “a vociferous nuisance and irritant” after attending their 1983 conference.

Grainy Metropolitan Police documents from the 1980s brim with information about the comings and goings of RCP members, their residences, and in some cases histories of street-fighting and arrests at demonstrations.

The RCP dissolved in 1997, but the network of people involved in it, and with Furedi, has persisted according to some - Guardian writer George Monbiot has described Furedi as the “godfather of the cult.”

“You never find people who were in the RCP calling me a cult leader,” Furedi insists. But he acknowledges the disciplined approach to reading and discussion he fostered in the party had an influence.

“You were expected to do a lot of intellectual work, otherwise you wouldn't be in the RCP. It was like a laboratory of ideas.

“That was, to me, the reason why we stayed together for such a long period of time. Because of the buzz that comes with discussion, debate, looking into books, looking into problems.

“But for some people that's seen as bizarre. You know, ‘why aren't you partying on a Saturday night or something? Why are you going away for the weekend to discuss Hegel's dialectics?’

“People that have come out of it have a certain sense of themselves, and a certain sense of confidence and belief that they can make things happen.

“There are many, many other people that are not named by Monbiot and all these other people, who went through the RCP.

“There are a lot of people who are in a very influential position,” and hence the tendency for people to conspiracy-theorise about their influence.

Munira Mirza, a former RCP member and PhD student of Furedi’s, served as a deputy to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, and adviser when he was PM.

Claire Fox, a key member of the RCP in its day, is now Baroness Fox in the House of Lords, and was a Brexit Party MEP.

Many other alumni are in academia or the media - especially Spiked Online, the effective successor of Living Marxism magazine.

“I'm very proud of the fact that I've had 50 PhD students, and a large number of them I'm still in contact with,” Furedi says.

“And we're still on the same page on most things, not everything.

“That's the job of an academic - creating your own school. I try to influence people.”

Many of that milieu, and Furedi especially, are now despised by the left as right-wing turncoats. They all supported Brexit, and the most prominent graduates are frontline soldiers in the culture war.

He wrote for Spiked in 2021 an article headlined “the trans assault on free speech”, castigating “transgenderism” as “the indoctrination of young minds” driven by an “authoritarian impulse.

In our interview he says mass immigration “undermines the very integrity of democracy,” and describes free speech as a “foundational freedom.” POLITICO magazine described him as “attack dog” for the right-wing government of Viktor Orbán. For many who see themselves as communists today, these are the indelible marks of the beast.

“You know, I don't feel I'm right-wing, but if people want to call me right-wing, I don't particularly care.”

“I mean, I call myself populist, humanist, or whatever, because these are labels that reflect my own self-image of what I think.

“There are things I'm very conservative about, things like history, tradition, the family, you know, those roots that bind a community together. I'm very liberal when it comes to individual freedoms, freedom of speech, the right to choose, autonomy. And I'm very left-wing when it comes to economic matters.”

Despite being in permanent opposition, Furedi says he is still optimistic: “There's no point in doing what I'm doing if I didn't believe that the world could be a better place.

“There's no such thing as a hopeless situation.”