Every Leftist revolution – Venezuela, Cuba, the USSR itself – follows the same pattern. First, Western observers gush over it – they’ve seen the future and it works. Then, as things begin to go wrong, they blame saboteurs and plead for time. Finally, when the revolution ends (as they all end) in hunger and labour camps, they insist that it was never properly socialist in the first place, and that “real socialism has never been tried”.