Barcelona, Lesser met Margaret Powell, a nurse. Powell, who was born in 1913 in Llangenny, Wales, arrived in Spain in 1937 and worked in International Brigade hospitals in Aragon, and at the end of the war was interned in a French concentration camp with Spanish refugees. She later worked with Quakers attending refugees, for which the Spanish Republican government in exile made her a Dame of the Order of Loyalty to the Spanish Republic. After the end of the civil war she helped to found Britain's first nurses' union, worked as a nurse in the rearguard during the Second World War, volunteered to help Yugoslavian refugees in Egypt, and worked with refugees and in maternity clinics in Germany. Lesser married Daily Worker switchboard operator Nell Jones in 1943, but shortly after renewed his acquaintance with Powell. He divorced Jones and married Powell in 1950. She lived with Lesser in Moscow during his time as a correspondent there, and on their return to England resumed nursing and was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Margaret died in 1990. She and Lesser had one daughter, Ruth. Later life Political allegiances Though he initially supported Khrushchev's reforms, he cited his experience surrounding the "Secret Speech" and the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as experiences which changed him politically, and later acknowledged that he was troubled by his own credulity in reporting the Slánský show trial. In the 1980s, splits developed in the Communist Party and the Morning Star between traditionalists and the dominant Eurocommunists. Lesser, in his capacity as the National Union of Journalists' Father of the Chapel, joined the Eurocommunist wing in opposition to Morning Star editor Tony Chater. The Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, and Lesser joined the Labour Party. Also in the 1990s, Lesser backed the post-Communist Democratic Left organisation. In November 2000, Lesser described himself not as a communist but as a socialist, and acknowledged that some friends considered him a Blairite. He said that having lived in Lambeth, he could "see the terrible, terrible damage that was done to the Labour party by the ultra-left," and felt that Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which called for state ownership of industry before its revision in 1995, was outdated. Poetry In 2007 Lesser's poetry was featured alongside other British war poets who wrote during the Civil War in Poetas ingleses del siglo XX, an anthology