King John

John McDonnell looks exhausted, slumped in his parliamentary office chair. Nobody said the revolution would be easy. Do he and Jeremy Corbyn have any catchphrases, I ask, to gee themselves up when battered by the right-wing press, the pundits or the moderates in their own party? ‘This will send the Daily Mail wild, OK,’ he says. ‘It’s Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

‘No matter how bad it gets, determination is what you need. We’re doing something we’ve been working for for 30, 40 years of our lives. And this opportunity has come. We didn’t expect it. But now it’s come we’re making the most of it.’

Hours before our interview, Labour’s Treasury team had one of their regular meetings with the former head of the civil service, the crossbencher Lord Kerslake. They’ve been meeting active civil servants, the heads of the Treasury and HMRC, and I’m told McDonnell has ‘a good working relationship’ with Mark Boleat, the former City of London Corporation policy chief. The drive is to assure everyone that — contrary to the expectations of many — Corbyn’s Labour is prepared for government.

‘The first 100 days will be radical,’ says McDonnell. ‘Within months we’d have our first Budget. We’d be into our Finance Bill a month after that and we’d be setting up the National Investment Bank. We’ll start investing in our housing programme. We’d be scrapping tuition fees. Jeremy laid out the priorities for civil servants about what we’d want in our first Queen’s Speech. It would be a radical laying of the foundation stones for the next five years.’

On Brexit, he says that Labour’s priority would be to ‘protect the economy and protect jobs… we don’t underestimate the mess we’ll be inheriting’. What if Labour found itself in power before March 2019, and the Article 50 deadline for withdrawal from the EU? He doesn’t blink at the idea, but stays away from the technicalities: ‘We’ve built in a transition period, so that will give us a bit of stability… We feel whatever the state of play will be, we’ll be able to secure a better deal with Europe or use that transition period to prepare the future.’