Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Will John McDonnell lock Tories up if Labour wins the next election?

Smiley, fluent and softly spoken, John McDonnell sometimes comes across as a bit cuddly. Yesterday Labour’s shadow chancellor was interviewed by Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival. He said he’s looking forward to a boating trip on the Norfolk Broads. ‘My wife and I sail. But we sail badly. People get off the water when they see us coming.’ He felt he deserved a break after working with the Tories on a cross-party approach to the Withdrawal Agreement.

‘No one should have to sit opposite Michael Gove for six weeks. I did it for the country.’

Iain Dale quizzed him about Labour’s immediate threat: Boris.

‘The guy’s reckless. The guy’s unstable,’ said McDonnell. ‘I will move heaven and earth to stop a no-deal Brexit.’ He added, ‘I think we will beat him.’

Dale suggested that Boris’s sunny optimism is a characteristic shared by winners like Tony Blair and Ronald Reagan. McDonnell shook his head. Optimism is a defining quality of his party, he said. ‘The transformative optimism of the Labour manifesto in 2017 helped us to close a polling gap of somewhere between 17 or 20 points during the campaign.’

But he won’t underestimate the new prime minister. Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor whom Boris ousted from City Hall in 2008, told McDonnell. ‘He’s the best campaigner I ever faced.’

McDonnell summarised Boris’s character. ‘He’s intelligent, manipulative and ruthless.’

Which doesn’t quite square with ‘unstable and reckless’.

Dale brought up Len McCluskey’s prediction that Labour will win the next election but without an overall majority. Would he consider a coalition with the SNP? McDonnell knows how toxic a Labour-SNP pact would be to voters in English constituencies. He quashed the idea.

‘We would form a minority government. If other parties won’t support our policies we’ll go back to the country and those parties will have to explain their stance.’

That sounded like a nod and a wink to the SNP.

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