After 1952, Reid had been singled out by the Party's General Secretary, John Gollan, as someone with the potential to play a future leading political role in the Party or, more likely, in the AEU. This involved moving to London in 1958 and becoming a full-time official and a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the CPGB. His move coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Party. First, following the publication of the British Road to Socialism in 1951 there was a rejection of its role as a revolutionary party; secondly, the secret session of the 20th Congress of the Communist International in February 1956 saw the denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev; thirdly, later that year the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. None of these momentous events shook Reid's belief in the Party or in any way diminished his support for the USSR. In many ways it could be argued it simply strengthened the ties between the Party and Reid as he came under the spell initially of Harry Pollitt, and, when he died, John Gollan. But in doing so, as we will see, he was forced to justify the unreasonable, the contradictions, the distortions and elisions of economic and political realities by the Party.

The British Road to Socialism, which sold over 200,000 copies, was mainly the work of Harry Pollitt, who was an advocate of the united front politics that had been Party strategy from the mid-1930s to the Nazi/Soviet Pact of 1941. This essentially involved working with progressive forces in society against Fascism and unemployment. In the 1950s, the Party claimed not to be a revolutionary party but ‘a left-wing parliamentary party, in contest with right-wing Labour’. It believed ‘in a peaceful transition to socialism through parliamentary activity and pluralistic democratic socialism’. Pollitt was not alone in the authorship of the British Road to Socialism; key passages were vetted and rewritten by Stalin. According to George Matthews, assistant general secretary of the Party, ‘Stalin's role in initiating the preparation of a long-term programme for Britain … was decisive’.Although some members, like Harry McShane, left in protest at the seemingly rightward drift of the Party, in many ways this was forced on it as its support was steadily declining.