The real face of John McDonnell shows a sneering, nasty thug

RSNEER at Donald Trump’s reckless language and tangled tweets all you like, but what about the banality and nastiness of Corbyn’s Labour? Its public utterances can be just as awful, and the sheer malice of some of the party’s leading figures (and their shock troops, Momentum) is beyond dispute.

They actually take pride in their nastiness - just like The Donald relishes his boorish, bullying tweets and speeches. No need for a cigarette paper to slide between Trump’s and shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s wilder utterances – there isn’t a crack wide enough to insert it.

This week a recording of McDonnell’s gross attack on Tory minister Esther McVey was broadcast for the first time, on BBC One. It’s deeply revealing. McDonnell – who has a mouth and jaw shaped by character to resemble a steel rat-trap – was speaking in November 2014. The date is significant. It was six months before Corbyn became party leader, against every expectation and prediction. What used to be dubbed the “loony left” was secure in the certainty that they’d never get a sniff of power, so people like McDonnell felt they could playact politics. Nothing to lose from grandstanding to a permanent fringe.

Or offering a hostage to fortune, as it would turn out.

McDonnell said activists had launched a “sack Esther McVey Day” on her birthday. (Nice). He added that when speaking at a packed public meeting, there’d been a big group in the audience “critical of the whole concept, because they were arguing: ‘Why are we sacking her, why aren’t we lynching the b ****** ?’” The audience duly laughed. So did the grinning McDonnell.

Lynch her? Obviously, it’s a joke. But not a funny one. It plays to a slack-jawed, reactionary gallery of knee-jerks. And it typifies McDonnell’s troubling fantasies of murderous violence. He once said he’d like to go back in time to assassinate Margaret Thatcher.

Assassination. Lynching. Extra-judicial slayings of political opponents seem to be part of McDonnell’s disturbing dreamworld. I sense a theme here. Any half-decent psychiatrist would have a field day. Six months after the lynch speech, Corbyn was – to his own astonishment – elected Labour leader and an even more surprised McDonnell became shadow chancellor.

And how the lynch-meister changed, almost overnight. Out with scruffy clothes; in with smart dark suits, protruding white shirt-cuffs, stiff white collars above dark, pressed ties. No talk of lynching opponents; just measured, moderate and reasonable-sounding statements carefully chosen to mask the Marxist revolutionary behind them.

Say what you like about Trump - at least he’s stayed true to himself: on-message, and in his own weird way, honest. Yanks know what they’re getting if they vote for him again. In that narrow sense, he’s trustworthy.

McDonnell? I wouldn’t trust him one step out of the room.