John McDonnell’s Mao moment is a dirty trick on his own party | Jonathan Jones

The shadow chancellor may as well have unfurled the red flag, climbed up to the strangers’ gallery and waved the Little Red Book about while declaring a people’s soviet

The looks on the faces of the government front bench say it all. They literally cannot believe what they are seeing. David Cameron is bursting with mirth and happiness – this is beyond anything a Conservative prime minster can dream of. For there on the Table (this item of House of Commons furniture that divides the government and opposition front bench teams should apparently be capitalised) sits The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. The book that pampered western student revolutionaries touted in the 1960s while cadres of the Cultural Revolution in China carried it as they bullied and punished intellectuals. It sits there on the green baize, bloodily, gorily, insanely and absurdly red, after shadow chancellor John McDonnell produced it, quoted from it and then flung it in George Osborne’s direction, attempting to make a satirical point about Osborne’s cosying up to China, affecting to offer him advice on how he might learn from his new friends – yet apparently not seeing the potential danger of a shadow chancellor seen as “far left” producing the Bible of the far, far, far, far left.

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