Watch: Diane Abbott on the positives of Chairman Mao

Today John McDonnell has continued to face flak after his attempt at a Chairman Mao joke in the Commons spectacularly backfired. On the Today Show, he was confronted by Diane Wei Liang, a Chinese author who was sent to a labour camp as a child, where she was forced to quote from Mao’s Little Red Book. Wei Liang made the point that McDonnell’s joke was unlikely to prove funny ‘for the millions of people who died during Mao’s regime, nor for those who lived through those times’.

Should McDonnell need a comrade to help fight his corner, Mr S suspects he could do worse than to give Diane Abbott a call. Abbott — who has recently been given the nickname Madame Mao by her Labour colleagues — once preached about the positives of Mao on television.

In 2008 during an appearance on This Week, Abbott found herself fighting the communist leader’s corner during a discussion on dictators with Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo:

MP: Mao Zedong killed 30 million, 60 million.