John McDonnell, the grandfatherly revolutionary with a taste in soft furnishings more chintz than Marx, is at his most soothing as he appeals for the rehabilitation of his old comrade Jeremy Corbyn.
“What is Jeremy going to do if he’s re-elected as a Labour MP? What harm is he going to do? He is going to concentrate on what he has done for most of his political life, foreign affairs and human rights.”
Sir Keir Starmer is fast approaching the moment he will have to decide whether to allow Corbyn to contest his Islington North seat as Labour candidate or finally cut him adrift.
The betting is heavily on the latter course with Starmer choosing to underline his repudiation of his predecessor. If Corbyn stands as an independent, McDonnell, his former shadow chancellor and lifelong friend, will be expelled if he gives him his support.
“It’s just so divisive. I’m still hoping against hope Keir lets the local members decide who they want – and I’m pretty sure they want Jeremy.”
McDonnell’s case is that Corbyn running as an independent would be a damaging media circus. “Jeremy doesn’t want to distract from the national campaign.”
He also says Starmer needs to accept that his predecessor reaches parts of the electorate he doesn’t. “They may not like it but there’s a large number of people that support Jeremy.
“I think he’d be a campaigning asset, particularly in certain communities and amongst certain groups of people and certainly within London itself. Why deny yourself that?”
McDonnell, 72, says he wrote to the Labour leader about the Corbyn issue. In fact he seems to write to him quite a bit; in the course of an interview with the i in his Commons office he refers to missives on taxation, on personnel and on election strategy.
We’re speaking in the aftermath of Starmer’s final pre-election reshuffle that is written up as the completion of the Blairite takeover. Even Tony Blair found room for figures from the left like Robin Cook in his Cabinet, McDonnell points out.
He says he fears that it’s “a bit Emperor’s new clothes” around the Labour leader. Factionalism – a charge that was laid at Corbyn’s door – is clearly alive and well in Labour, only the media narrative is rather different when it is the left that is being marginalised.
McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington in west London, believes one of the lessons of the Uxbridge by-election defeat was that the local party was sidelined by Labour HQ. “They felt like it was an invading army”. Asked about the people around Starmer, he calls them “Mandelson’s people”.
Ever the operator, McDonnell avoids personal attacks on the new Shadow Cabinet team, however, but says instead they are being set up to fail. The determination of Starmer and Rachel Reeves, his successor as shadow Chancellor, to rule out new wealth taxes and borrowing to fund day-to-day expenditure and bring the national debt down has placed all members of the Shadow Cabinet in a “very difficult position” he says.
“They may have innovative ideas but if we are going to maintain the levels of Tory expenditure then it gives them an impossible task.”
Although he insists he is not complacent, he says baldly that “Labour is going to win the election”. The Tories are too far behind to recover and can’t change leader again, he adds. The only real question is the size of the majority. That, in turn requires people to have a positive reason for voting Labour other than just booting out the current incumbents.
He says Harold Wilson was right in saying it is the people that stay at home that determine elections. Turning out the Labour vote requires them to be given some hope, he argues.
McDonnell wants his party to confront the scale of the challenge ahead and win a mandate for the measures needed because the alternative, he says, is a fragile government unable to withstand voters’ disillusionment.
“Unless we bite that bullet people are going to get very disillusioned. We’ve got to get real about what we’re going to face.” He says he feels most sympathy for Angela Rayner who, being handed responsibility for local government finance, has been given a “hospital pass”.
McDonnell says existing tax pledges – to scrap tax breaks for “non-doms” and private schools – aren’t “on the scale” that is needed. “You can only spend that money so many times.”
Meanwhile, promises to pump in extra cash for public services from increased growth lack credibility: “Instead of the magic money tree you’ll be accused of [believing in] a magic growth tree.”
His abiding regret of his time at the top was not preparing the ground for the 2019 election properly. “We lost the narrative between 2017 and 2019,” says McDonnell.
“I wrote to Keir – the lesson from 2019 was I was throwing out policy after policy trying to move away from Brexit and it didn’t work because people thought, “Well this isn’t credible, you can’t do all these things.’ It takes about 18 months to introduce a new policy, you announce it, you rebut the wave of criticism, then you start to explain in more detail and link to people’s lives – it takes time. My message is: don’t run out of time.”