John McDonnell: Crass Idiot

LabourList commenting on McDonnell's assassination "joke" with considerable understatement:

John McDonnell says he was on the GLC - and that if he could go back in time and do one thing, he would visit the 1980s and "assassinate Thatcher". The wisdom of such a statement really has to be questioned.

I think we can go further than that. I think we can roundly condemn McDonnell for his atrocious comment. It would seem a crass thing to say among friends in a pub: to say in a public hustings surrounded by your rivals as you campaign for the leadership of Britain's Opposition party seems to be idiotic in the extreme.

But in a sense it explains something for me: how McDonnell consistently fails to manage to get on the ballot paper in Labour leadership contests. His words are very revealing - he is an old school Labour party member, a tribal thinker still fighting the battles of the 1980s - the era when the Labour party consistently lost elections. He'd be a total liability as Labour leader simply because he doesn't get modern politics - either what the Labour party should be fighting in this day and age (the Con-Dem coalition, rather than a woman who hasn't been Prime Minister for twenty years) or how modern politics works, and that a crass comment and/or a bad joke can get across the country almost instantaneously.

LabourList should not only question the wisdom of McDonnell's comment, they should also seriously question the wisdom of John McDonnell the politician and John McDonnell the man.