John McDonnell in 2006 as he challenged Gordon Brown

First published October 2006

Parking in the driveway (more of an overgrown space between two apparently derelict buildings) of the constituency office of John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, the photographer nervously admits that everything should be taken out of the car.

It's not an auspicious start to an interview with the man who has declared he will challenge Gordon Brown to be the next leader of the Labour Party. Where is the fancy office, the spin doctors and the usual entourage of sharp suited advisors, keepers and general ego-masseurs armed with their Blackberries?

In a world of political giants, John McDonnell, is a mouse. He isn't big on the culture of personality- he's too self-deprecating for that - and he isn't big on the pizzazz of gesture politics. What he is big on is honesty, policies based on socialist principles and staying true to your values.

That may sound a little old fashioned in our 21^st century world of political spin and soundbite, but he believes the electorate has tired of that and wants a return to something that resembles transparency and truth.

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He says that after nine years of New Labour being in power in Westminster, levels of inequality have risen and social cohesion has been eroded. He believes that is not what Labour should be about and he is determined to do something about it.

Two months ago, the 55-year-old announced his candidacy for the Labour leadership - believing inherently that a simple shoo in of a Blairite would be democratically negligent - and by all accounts, is attracting an enthusiastic following among party supporters.

However, with the party's constitution requiring him to get 44 Labour MPs to back his campaign before a leadership battle could be staged, it's a steep mountain to climb. As a result, he has embarked on a gruelling round of talks and debates with constituency organisations and trade unions to garner support.

Next month, he will attend the Scottish Labour Party conference in Oban to try and persuade the party faithful that there should be a return to what he calls real Labour.

Few people outwith the Labour Party and trade union movement may have heard of McDonnell but he has been involved in local London politics for at least 30 years and been an MP since 1997.

He was elected to the GLC at 29, rising (or in Daily Mailspeak, plunging) to be Ken Livingstone's deputy and he has been credited with transforming Livingstone's public profile from dangerous Red Ken to a well loved, cuddly politician.

When asked what makes him think he could possibly challenge the expected coronation of Gordon Brown, he will ask you who had heard of Tony Blair before his surprise emergence wearing the shiny cloak of New Labour? He also points out that at 29, he was deputy leader of the GLC, chair of finance and ran a three billion pound budget. Who of the current leaders or potential leaders could have boasted that at the same point he is now?

So here we are in this depressing low rise office that has no apparent frills - not even a mirror tile in the loo to check your best electoral winning smile. And the man that has either been ignored by the media or painted as some raving left winger who wants to drag Great Britain back into the dark old days of trade union domination and the perils of the loony left, is making us all a coffee and apologising for not wearing a suit - he thought the photographer was arriving the next day.

In fact, McDonnell looks more like the man from M&S than the cover boy for the Socialist Worker. Facially, he is an interesting morphing of John Humphries (top half) and Peter Mandelson, his nemesis, (the bottom half).

He speaks softly and laughs a great deal, especially when asked why he is portrayed as a raging red. "They never do that with the right-wing do they?" he questions. "They never prefix them with the label ‘proto-fascist’. Why do they do it with me? Because they like branding people. I am on the left. I am a socialist, avowedly so. It's something I am proud of. It’s that straightforward."

There's something puzzling me. Has done for a while. Does he think it is incongruous that when we have had a Labour government for nine years that it is viewed as a negative that you can be in the Labour Party and be on the left? More laughter. "That's what I'm trying to turn round," he says straightforwardly. "That's my whole ambition. What I'm trying to do is rehabilitate the left in terms of within the Labour Party, but around the world as well.

"New Labour politicians are talking a lot about having to reinvent themselves, make them more trustworthy in the eyes of the electorate if they want to win the next election. That's because they were nothing more than a continuation of Thatcherism and Majorism and all the rest. What I genuinely believe people are looking for is the end of all that.

“I'm trying to invite the Labour Party to explore a new approach, which is about saying this is 21st socialism. That's the debate I want the Labour Party to have and New Labour is invited to that discussion."

Having just returned from the Labour Party conference in Manchester - Blair's last one as leader - he didn't find many New Labour apparatchiks knocking on his door but he says he was heartened by the reception he received from grassroots party members. Having made repeated but failed attempts to speak in the main conference hall, his oratory was reserved to the many fringe meetings. Speaking at a meeting of the Campaign for Democracy within the Labour Party (interesting thought), he was met by rapturous applause and an almost tangible sigh of relief by party members who have tired of not being heard.

"What was interesting is that the conference itself did exactly as we expected," he says. "It was a stage-managed event to prepare the exit for Tony Blair. That's exactly as expected but even I was shocked at how  far it was stage-managed, with people handing out handwritten placards as he speaks with 'We love you Tony', which I think was slightly over the top. This strategy of making sure that the conference was so sanitized by having full-time officials on every row to organise the standing ovations, it just does not work anymore and people see through all that. In terms of the formal conference, they tried to minimise debate.

 "On the fringe, however, people were wandering about, some of them completely lost, but all with the same theme - that outside of this cocoon is a whole world of issues we have got to face, otherwise we won't survive as a government.  

"From the New Labour elements, looking to the future, they call it renewal, and what I say is, I want to invite you into a much longer-term debate than the one that is just about winning the next election but also one that has to be had pretty quickly because we haven't got much time left. Let's talk about what shared objectives we've got and see what differences we've got, in terms of how to address those shared objectives. In that way, we can hold the party together. If we just try and close the debate down, then we'll wither on the vine."

I say this sounds quite reasonable and hardly the mad ramblings of some ranting Trot. He throws his head back and laughs again. "It is reasonable, because I believe in democracy," he says.

He says that the similarities between New Labour and the Tory policies that came before means that this identikit approach to running a country has failed for 30 years to create an improved society. He says there is now a chance of going back to some of Labour's original principles and seeing how they can be implemented in the 21st century setting. Oh, I can hear Middle England quiver.

When he says go back, doesn't that mean accepting trade union domination? Doesn't it mean re-nationalisation of industries and the return of the loony left? More laughter.

"First of all people rewrite history and there is a trend now for anyone that comes up with a radical idea from the left to try and denigrate them by branding them as old Labour, which is taking us back to the dark ages of the seventies or eighties. In that way, they just terminate the debate," he says.

"What we are trying to say is the problems we are addressing haven't been solved by New Labour policies in the last nine years, they weren't solved by Thatcherite policies before that, so let's look at genuine alternatives." He mentions redistribution of wealth, of creating a more equal society, of peace, of putting some industries back into public ownership. In fact, he talks about ideology. This is mad man talk, I say. It will make many Brits feel nervous.

"Well, I think the pitch to those that have against those that have not, is that if you want to live in a society where you feel safe and secure, in which you live in a decent environment which isn't covered in graffiti, and in which you also are not under the same levels of stress as everybody else, then it's about inequality. It's about how you make a fairer society, about how we're more equal." But isn't that what Blair et al promised with their New Labour approach?

“I don't think nine years ago they actually came in with a serious understanding of inequality itself," he says. "They came in with a commitment to equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is not a socialist outcome, it just means that you can compete on equal ground. Well some of us can't compete as well as others.

“What socialism's about is equality of outcome, it isn't just about equality of opportunity. Now I don't think in 1997 any of them came in with the concept of equality of outcome. And that's what we need to move towards. Even where they have said we're doing this because it will make a more equal society, it's failed anyway."

At the heart of this is McDonnell's feelings of being badly let down by wolves dressed in Labour Parry clothes. He is convinced that New Labour was an unnecessary invention and that if John Smith had survived then things would have worked out differently.

“Smith was a traditional Labour Party politician who believed in the broad church of the Labour Party, so there was a role for the left, right and centre,” says McDonnell. “He rejected the throwing out of Clause Four, and if you remember, he cleared out people like Mandelson, just cleared them out. We were then moving forward to take our people with us, basing our positions on really enthusiastic democratic debate.

“Smith let people speak, that was what's good about it. When he died, we were at our most vulnerable. We'd been out of office for 15 years by that time, we'd just lost the Labour leader we were building our hopes on to take us to the next election. Intensely vulnerable, and a coup occurred. It was a coup orchestrated by Mandelson, Blair and Brown, and they announced New Labour almost as a new party. No one knew what it meant, but people, trade unions and others, signed up to getting into power no matter what."

Surely people didn't just sign up without reading the small print? "I think they did," he says emphatically. "If you're out of power for that long, you're desperate to get back.  "It was very difficult to distinguish the political trajectory that Blair, Mandelson, Brown and others were putting forward at that time from what had gone in the past from the Tories. Why do I say that? First of all, there was no discussion about how we democratise our economy. There was no commitment to dramatic tackling of inequality, and there was no commitment at that point in time about how we organise our society so that we would end the privatisation of public services.

“At that point, we go into the '97 election, we win overwhelmingly because people want to kick the Tories out, and then what determined for me where New Labour was going, were the first votes. And the first votes were to cut child benefit for lone parents. I think that was a line to be crossed for New Labour that I wasn't willing to cross, and at that stage, you realised that this was a continuation of the last 20 years under the Tories, basically.

"Labour has done some good things, but nowhere near enough that was expected of us or what we expected of ourselves, and then, of course, Iraq comes along and destroys trust in the government overall. That's my view, that the legacy of Blair will be a waste of nine years and Iraq, and that's the tragedy."

McDonnell is no doubt a politician of conviction. You only need to look at his voting record; opposed the war in Iraq, voted against ID cards, protest over an assortment of bills that hint of an infringement of human rights, against the government on matters of immigration and asylum.

Sadly, this could be his Achilles heel in a political milieu that demands loyalty to the party line - he could be accused of being a maverick and in a world of political clones, that is not a positive thing. He disputes this and points to the stand Robin Cook took over Iraq.

 "When you look at Robin Cook's resignation speech, you'll see behind him a grey-haired bloke trying to organise a standing ovation, and that's me. You're not allowed to clap in parliament and you're certainly not allowed standing ovations, but I thought this was a fundamental point in the history of the Labour Party where a senior Cabinet member gets up, and on a point of principle, says this is wrong, I'm resigning and I'm now speaking out.

“I wanted people to recognise that this could be a turning point in the debate. It was disappointing others didn't resign, because if there had been ministers and others resigning at the same time, we might have held back the invasion of Iraq, I don't know, but more importantly, we would have got to a situation where the Labour leadership and others would have realised people were able to stand up with courage and say I'm not having it. We need to do more of that."

It's fighting talk and from a standing start of two months ago when people were saying John who?, McDonnell can cite that his leadership campaign has got to the point where at the TUC on the Electoral Reform Society ballot, he got 53 per cent of the votes.

He can mention the Newsnight poll where he drew level with Gordon Brown. And he can show you that within the constituency parties, if you look at the various blog sites, he is ahead of any other contender. His own site set up in July has already attracted 350,000 hits.

"What does any of that say?" he asks. "It doesn't say anything about John McDonnell. What it says is that the analysis we're putting forward and the policies that we're putting forward, are having a resonance. Why? Well, the policies I'm standing upon are traditional Labour Party policies."

What he says makes a lot of sense but even as he speaks, you can see the red- top headlines- 'Mad Marxist ate my hamster'.

"I come to this with some form," he says disarmingly. "I was Ken Livingstone's deputy on the GLC, for goodness' sake. People will remember that but what's interesting about that period is that virtually every policy we advocated on the GLC is now mainstream government policy.

 "So all those issues that I feel I've stood up for as a matter of principle, people will turn round and say either he was right, or I disagree with him but at least he was honest, at least he was straight. And that's what I'm about, basically."

As we leave, he apologises for sounding waffily. Funny, I haven't heard a politician sounding so clear in a long time. 

Image by Alister Thorpe, 2006​