With artists usually competing with each other to embrace Leftism, it is refreshing to talk to Sir James Macmillan, possibly Britain’s greatest living composer of classical music.
“I joined the Young Communist League in 1974,” he tells me in the radically plutocratic surroundings of the Promenade Bar at London’s Dorchester Hotel. “It was part of a rebellion against my devoutly Catholic family. Looking back on it, it was a way of finding out about the world and of finding out about politics, although a very biased one.
“I think it was important, as part of my intellectual growth. But I look back on it with utter shame. It is certainly the worst thing I have ever done in my life. If I gave any...