SCARGILL’S DISCIPLE AND THE DAMNING SILENCE OF MILIBAND

THERE is a drawing of Lenin in his office, and books on the shelves lionising Leftwing heroes like Tony Benn and the revolutionary Che Guevara. They tell you everything you need to know about the union leader now threatening a national strike by tanker drivers that could see petrol stations running dry and school run mothers, small businesses and haulage firms alike scrambling for fuel.

But then Len Mccluskey, the general secretary of Unite – one of Britain’s biggest unions with 1.8 million members – revels in his Red Len nickname.

The most militant union leader since Arthur Scargill, whom he admires, Mccluskey wants to turn the clock back to the Seventies, when strikes regularly brought the country to a standstill.

‘We are supposed to believe that the Seventies was a horrible time. It wasn’t. It was a time of great advances for working people,’ he says.

Typically, Mccluskey, 61, has refused to rule out staging the strikes over the Easter break when thousands of families will drive long distances on holiday.

He was the Unite official who masterminded the 2010 strike by BA cabin crew, which cost the company £150million.

Such is the growing panic in Downing Street that David Cameron is talking of drafting in the military. And yet on an issue that should unite all political parties, there has been silence from Ed Miliband.

His failure to speak out is all the more alarming when you consider that fewer than half of the 2,000 drivers who deliver fuel voted for industrial action.

But there is of course a good reason Miliband has failed to criticise Mccluskey: his union, along with several others, are Labour’s paymasters, providing nearly 90 per cent of the party’s funding. It was their support, too, that swept Ed Miliband to victory over his brother David.

No wonder the feeble Miliband has form for refusing to challenge union barons. Equally as embarrassing for him, I have learned, is the fact that the Unite official leading the negotiations over the strike is Diana Holland – whose other job is Treasurer of the Labour Party.

But it is the firebrand Mccluskey that Miliband seems incapable of controlling. In an interview with The Guardian, he made one of his most outrageous threats when he refused to rule out strikes during the London 2012 Olympics.

‘The idea the world should arrive in London and have these wonderful Olympic Games as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden is unthinkable,’ he said.

Even Brendan Barber, the head of the TUC, disassociated himself from that shameful outburst.

But for nearly 24 hours after the comments emerged, there was no word from Miliband. When he finally broke his silence, it was not on TV or radio but via Twitter. ‘Any threat to the Olympics is totally unacceptable and wrong. This is a celebration for the whole country and must not be disrupted,’ he tweeted.

Not only was there no condemnation of Mccluskey, he was not even mentioned by name. The hypocrisy of Miliband is sickening. Since the row over Tory party donors gaining access to David Cameron broke at the weekend, Miliband has been excoriating in his criticism.

He interrupted his Sunday to go on television – not Twitter you note – to attack Cameron after the resignation of Peter Cruddas as Tory treasurer following a newspaper sting in which he was secretly taped bragging he could fix access to the PM for £250,000.

Miliband said: ‘David Cameron prefers to listen to those who have given millions of pounds to the Conservative Party in exchange for donor dinners and special access in Downing Street.’

YET how much has Red Len’s Unite given to Labour in the past five years? A staggering £20million, or 25 per cent of every penny the party has collected.

Some £4.7million has been handed over since Miliband’s election as Labour leader in September 2010, the equivalent of £1.5million every six months. Peter Cruddas, by the way, gave £1.2million to the Tories over several years.

Mccluskey made clear what he expects from Miliband in return for his union’s millions in an interview with the hard left Tribune magazine. ‘If there are people in the party who just see us as a cash cow, the dotty aunt and uncle who should be kept in the attic and just brought out to sign cheques, then that’s not going to happen. We want to make certain that our views and beliefs are listened to,’ he said.

Only this week, Mccluskey was throwing his weight around again, this time on the BBC’S Hard Talk. ‘We’re affiliated to the Labour Party – it’s our party. We try to influence it to make certain that the views we believe in are actually propagated by the leadership of the party.’ So who is the man who has manoeuvred himself to have such an insidious hold over Labour?

The son of a Liverpool docker, he was a shop steward at 19. ‘I led lots of strikes,’ he recalled. The truth is more worrying. Mccluskey boasts he has led more strikes than any other general secretary.

He learnt his rabble rousing from Derek Hatton, when the Militant Tendency had a stranglehold on Liverpool city council. But his ambition took him to London, where he advanced up the ladder of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which later merged into Unite.

In 1994, after almost 25 years of marriage, he left his wife Ann to set up home with his lover Paula Lace. Some of the money for this was provided by a cut-rate £90,000 loan from the TGWU. There was worse to come for his family. It emerged he had already fathered a child with another union colleague.

His class war rhetoric came into its own with the election of Old Etonian Cameron, and he was elected Unite chief in 2010. One of the most powerful union officials, he is one of the best paid, too, with a £97,000 salary.

After his election, he declared that there was ‘no mandate’ for the Coalition to rule. But he hardly has one either. Only 15 per cent of the 1.8 million Unite members bothered to vote in the leadership election. He received 101,000 votes, which means that less than seven per cent of members backed him.

After he took power, he said: ‘Do I believe the law is sacrosanct? I absolutely do not.’ He said it was ‘a duty’ to disobey what he decides are ‘bad laws’. He added: ‘We must prepare for battle.’ The threatened tanker drivers’ strike could be the start of that fight.