Mcdonnell: hard-left fist in a velvet glove

The shadow chancellor’s Churchill remark reveals the true militant behind his carefully avuncular image

Is John Mcdonnell the most dangerous politician in Britain? This country has never – and will never – actively vote in a Marxist-sympathising Prime Minister. But if disillusioned Tory voters spoil their ballots or vote for a protest party at the next election, then we could end up with one by accident. Jeremy Corbyn might technically be leader, but the man in charge would undoubtedly be Mr Mcdonnell, the architect of Corbynism and dubbed the Leader of the Opposition’s “puppetmaster”.

The Labour number two’s outburst about Winston Churchill being a “villain” – all because, Mcdonnell implied, Churchill had sanctioned the use of force to contain the Tonypandy coal mine riots – is a reminder of why the country should fear the MP for Hayes and Harlington. He may put on the act that he has mellowed into an avuncular social democrat. But from time to time the mask slips and we get a glimpse of the real man, with all his corridor-minded tribalism, and synthetic self-identification with “the working class”.

It is not the first time that Mcdonnell has let his guard down. At a Stop the War event on Remembrance Sunday in 2014, he referred to the call made at a Liverpool public meeting for Esther Mcvey, the former Tory minister, to be lynched. Four years earlier, he joked that he wished he could go back in time and “assassinate Thatcher”. He has also claimed that former IRA militants should be “honoured”.

Mr Mcdonnell is an Eighties Trotskyist bruiser. He cut his political teeth not on the picket lines of mining towns but in the debating chambers of the Greater London Council, where even Red Ken fell out with him for being too extreme. He is imbued with both the slippery cleverness of a career politician and the spiteful aggression of a soldier who has missed his war. And he would be a disaster for this country, bulldozing through high-tax, high-spend plans that would cripple growth.

But the shadow chancellor is cunning. This is the man who reportedly once handed out to his shadow cabinet copies of the works of Cicero, the Roman orator who excelled in switching personas to argue both sides of any given topic with equal aplomb.

Labour’s “Jekyll and Hyde” knows that he must win over middle-class voters to triumph at the next election. To achieve this, he has made impressive efforts to rebrand himself as a metropolitan-friendly socialist. He has advocated John Lewis-inspired cooperatives and a green jobs revolution. He humbly talks of narrowing the gender pay gap and renationalising the water industry. Mcdonnellism is also couched in subconsciously reassuring language; Corbyn’s right-hand man is vowing to “rewire” capitalism in a country where many still remember the Seventies worker go-slows that led to power cuts.

Despite the Churchill gaffe, which will only further isolate working-class Leave voters, the shadow chancellor’s determination to rehabilitate the hard Left will no doubt continue to steadily pay off. Corbyn’s approval ratings may have tanked, but public support for Mcdonnell’s economic vision is gaining ground. One recent poll found that 83 per cent were in favour of renationalising water. A voracious reader of everything, from books on the blockchain revolution to Aristotle’s Politics, Mcdonnell has also been adept at ingrating himself with the cerebral Left-leaning elements of the middle class who bristle at Mr Corbyn’s intellectual laziness. So popular is Mcdonnell with this clique, that many even compare him to his personal hero Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand founder of the NHS.

This is ironic, given that the notorious rivalry between Churchill and Bevan (whom the former once branded a “squalid nuisance”) matured into the kind of mutual respect that great men who disagree often come to share. Following tributes to Bevan after his death in 1960, Churchill was observed sitting in the parliamentary chamber alone, reflecting on his famous adversary. Such are the nuances of history that the likes of Mcdonnell, who get a vicarious thrill channelling other people’s battles, will never grasp. This is no socialist statesman-in-waiting but a cheap hologram of the hard-left’s militant tradition. And if he ends up in power by default, he will wreak havoc on Britain.