DOMINIC LAWSON

JOHN McDONNELL wants us to know he has been offended. Grotesquely so, in fact. The Shadow Chancellor has been hurt by remarks made by Chuka Umunna, a fellow labour MP, who last week called upon the party’s hard left leadership to ‘call off the dogs’.

Mr Umunna was complaining about the way supporters of Jeremy Corbyn had been mounting campaigns to deselect labour MPs thought insufficiently hostile to Israel: for the labour leader and the activists who worship him, antiZionism is the essential political cause, much more important than fighting poverty in the UK.

Furious on these activists’ behalf, McDonnell has told the BBC: ‘our party members are not dogs. They’re human beings. I find it grotesquely offensive that anybody, particularly a labour MP, refers to our party members as dogs.’

McDonnell knows perfectly well that Umunna was using the word metaphorically. As was the labour MP who challenged Gordon Brown for the party leadership in 2007 and demanded that his bruiser of an opponent ‘call off the dogs’. That MP was . . . John McDonnell. In fact, it is McDonnell’s offence-taking that is ‘grotesque’, given his history of embracing not just foul abuse, but actual physical violence. In 2014, he enthusiastically quoted an activist who said of the then Work and Pensions minister, the Conservative MP esther McVey, that ‘we should be lynching the b*****d’.

Outburst

McDonnell repeated this, to laughter from his audience. But when the BBC’s Andrew Marr confronted him about it, he refused to apologise to McVey, conceding only that ‘it is for those people who made that statement if they wish to make that apology’. In other words, McDonnell refused to criticise his supporters who had called for Ms McVey to be ‘lynched’.

But then he is in no position to criticise extreme violence from the hard left. he has long been an advocate of it himself.

When in 2010 there was a co-ordinated attack on the Conservative Party headquarters at Westminster’s Millbank — during which one demonstrator threw a fire extinguisher from the roof onto the police below — McDonnell praised ‘the students kicking the s**t out of Millbank’ describing them as ‘ the best of our movement’.

McDonnell has even praised murder in the pursuit of a political cause he supports: the absorption of northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland.

In 2003 he told a meeting of Irish Republicans that IRA terrorists should be ‘honoured’ as ‘it was the bombs and bullets . . . that brought Britain to the negotiating table’.

(As a matter of fact, it was the British security services’ complete penetration of the IRA’s networks that brought Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to the negotiating table, but you’d never catch McDonnell praising our side in that conflict.)

That outburst was long before the remarkable ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn to the role of leader of her Majesty’s opposition, and of his closest colleague McDonnell to the position of Chancellor of exchequer in waiting.

Since that extraordinary takeover of the labour Party’s ruling heights by a Marxist clique, McDonnell has been assiduously wiping his own slate clean: to persuade the voters he is no threat to the peaceful and tolerant British way of life.

To this end, he has just given a lengthy interview to the editor of the new Statesman magazine, Jason Cowley. When Cowley asked if he still advocated the ‘need to fight physically on the streets’, McDonnell replied: ‘no . . .as soon as you get into violence, people then start turning off, so the message gets undermined.’

note that McDonnell is not actually criticising political violence on moral grounds. his revised view is that he is against it because it is counter-productive. I find that less reassuring than repulsive.

In a further attempt to demonstrate that he is in the mainstream labour tradition — rather than the Marxist strain that despises Britain’s parliamentary democracy — McDonnell tells Cowley his ‘political hero’ is Clement Attlee. Really?

The labour leader who gave the goahead for Britain’s nuclear deterrent and was a guiding force behind the creation of the anti-Soviet defence alliance known as nato? Both Corbyn and McDonnell have always been bitterly opposed to both these achievements.

Clement Attlee would have been appalled by the thought of labour coming under the grip of such people.

Intolerance

As Attlee’s biographer John Bew wrote: ‘Class conflict was anathema to him.’ And he records how Attlee said ‘he admired the public spirit of the country notables, mostly Tories’. Indeed, Attlee’s own wife was thought to be a Conservative voter.

Unlike John McDonnell, who told Cowley he could think of no Conservative MP for whom he had the slightest admiration, his supposed hero was not only able to work with those of a different political outlook, he married such a person. There could not be a greater contrast with McDonnell’s sectarian intolerance, however much he now tries to contain it.

Actually, for McDonnell and Corbyn the biggest enemies are not the Tories, but their opponents in the labour Party — those they see as followers of Tony Blair, who committed the unpardonable sin of abandoning ‘ Clause 4’ socialism and, worse still, winning three general elections on such a prospectus of class betrayal.

That is why they hate Chuka Umunna, an unapologetic defender of the Blairite middle- of-the road consensus — and why they are delighted that others of that admittedly shallow persuasion are being picked off one by one in their constituencies.

Umunna, however, has pointed out the darkest side of this agenda — its embrace of anti-Semitism, which has long gripped the hard left of British politics, obsessed as they are with the idea that ‘Jewish money’ is manipulating governments across the world to support Israel.

But not that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which refuses even to acknowledge the existence of the state of Israel, referring to it only as ‘the Zionist entity’. This is the virulently anti-British theocratic regime whose english language broadcaster Press TV (now banned in the UK) paid £ 20,000 to Jeremy Corbyn, so frequently did he appear on it.

And Press TV gained exclusive access to last week’s meeting of the enfield north labour constituency party, in which a vote of no confidence was passed against its sitting MP Joan Ryan — who uncoincidentally is chair of labour Friends of Israel. Thus the vote against Ms Ryan was enthusiastically live-streamed to . . . the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Violent

And here’s another non- coincidence. The person who topped the ballot in the recent elections to labour’s national executive Committee was Yasmine Dar, a woman who regularly attends celebrations of the Iranian revolution.

no wonder Umunna declared last week that ‘labour, as an institution . . . is antiSemitic’ (and yesterday described his party as institutionally racist), citing how his Jewish parliamentary colleagues luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth have ‘set out in horrifying detail the antiSemitic abuse they have received . . . from supporters of Jeremy Corbyn’.

While it is true McDonnell has handed round stickers to shop owners in his constituency which declare that ‘to secure peace, we don’t sell Israeli goods’, he doesn’t share Corbyn’s connections with such violent anti-Semitic organisations as hamas and hezbollah.

And while Corbyn is a fanatic on this issue — which is utterly divorced from the real lives of the vast majority of Britons — McDonnell is a master of reassurance, coming across on television interviews as all reasonableness and amiability.

he is not only much more intelligent than Corbyn (in itself no great achievement), he is also a far more impressive politician than his leader. And he knows it — which is why he had twice challenged for the labour leadership before Corbyn was selected by the left caucus within the party, and, amazingly, succeeded.

In fact, if Corbyn were to fall, McDonnell would take up the reins: and the hardleft putsches now taking place in labour constituencies are reinforcing his position as much as they are Corbyn’s.

To continue Umunna’s canine metaphor, I’d like to say that McDonnell’s bark is worse than his bite.

But it is quite the other way around. he is genuinely dangerous.