Talk - John McDonnell MP and Tony Benn

After a persistent campaign to get hold of him we are rewarded with a call from John McDonnell MP. John is the only man who has announced as yet that he will stand against Gordon Brown in the forthcoming internal elections for the Labour leadership (and therefore graduate immediately to the role of Prime Minister). He’s currently on the campaigning trail, in the middle of an exhausting tour of the country talking to MP’s, union representatives, Labour Party members and members of the public. He will be speaking, along with Tony Benn, at the Town Hall this weekend. I ask him where he’s calling from. “I’m in a car, going to Parliament,” he says.

I ask him the gist of his campaign strategy. “So far everybody has assumed that Gordon Brown will succeed Tony Blair,” he says. “He is seen as being the natural successor to Blair, and people think it is inevitable that he will become the next leader of the Labour Party. But this is not necessarily the case. This is a democratic election, not a coronation, and there is an important debate about the future of the Labour Party and alternative Labour policy to be had.”

I ask him if we can expect his policies to hark back to the pre-Blair, or even pre-Kinnock era. “I’m neither New Labour or Old Labour,” he says. “I’m not trying to hark back to a pre-Blair era. I’m trying to define a 21st century form of socialism. There is a clear divide between myself and Gordon Brown on key policy areas.”