I would say that the pay-off line is Jenny Turner's waspish concession that 'Time has shown the RCP's arguments to have been sort of right'. The people around the LRB were mostly enthusiasts of the campaigns that the RCP mocked, like the campaign for 'humanitarian intervention' in Bosnia, or for 'safer sex' amongst teenagers, or against the ballot in the miners' strike.
Turner does not like it that the RCP happened to be right, and she happened to be wrong about those things, saying that it was out of 'rigidity not rigour'. Lots of her sources, like Nick Cohen and David Campbell are the people who got those questions wrong, and rallied to the cause of Blair's wars in the Balkans and the Middle East. They are, understandably, very bitter about where that took them, and blame those who pointed out their errors.
Lots of other things she says are wrong - so, for example, the RCP I was in did support the miners' strike, it just challenged Scargill's strategy of avoiding a nation-wide ballot. And there is lots of snidey gossip here, standing in for an argument - someone who sold Socialist Worker got told off by a fifteen year old RCP supporter in the 1980s and cannot forget about it, apparently.
As to what the ex-comrades get up to now - I think Claire Fox's 'Battle of Ideas' is a fine thing, and that Frank Furedi is right to draw attention to an infantilising current in a lot of contemporary social administration. I like Spiked too, and they carried my review of Nancy Fouts' exhibition yesterday http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9103/. Michael Fitzpatrick did do a brave thing when he pointed out that Dr Andrew Wakefield's case against MMR was more panic than fact, as he did when he pointed out that the government was exaggerating the likelihood of AIDS becoming epidemic in Britain.
Looking back, I would say that the RCP was a very creative enterprise and I am not surprised that those who were involved in it have had a big impact subsequently.