Don’t dismiss McDonnell as a loony

‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness,’ wrote the Conservative Scottish journalist Colm Brogan, ‘grass never grows again.’ But Roundup has its uses. When Brogan made this comment, Sir Stafford was Britain’s postwar ‘austerity’ chancellor of the exchequer, a post he held from 1947 to 1950. Dry as dust, Cripps had rejoined the Labour party only two years previously, having served as ambassador in Moscow, then in Churchill’s war cabinet. A leading voice on the hard left, he had been expelled from Labour for his advocacy of co-operation with communists in 1939, but his judgment had proved shrewd. Hard-edged, essentially pragmatic, but fiercely moral and always driven by belief, he proved a very effective chancellor indeed.

I’m increasingly persuaded that Labour will be reaching for the weedkiller again, soon, and that the man to do the job will be John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor. I write this as a Tory who believes an effective, capable and high-minded Labour chancellor would represent a far greater danger than a loony ideologue. Mr McDonnell, I believe, is the former, and Tories are unwise to dismiss him as the latter.

But I’m not entirely sure he wants to be prime minister. He’s in some ways too serious for that. ‘I will be the first socialist Labour chancellor,’ he has said. This had been Cripps’s intention too. Instead, for much of the time he found himself (as most Labour chancellors do) firefighting.

McDonnell is well-equipped both intellectually and emotionally for similar battles, some of which will be to douse flames that his own remarks have caused. Having secured his authority within his own party (he won four standing ovations during his speech at Labour’s Liverpool conference on Monday), he has started firefighting already.