Shadow chancellor John McDonnell branded a ‘clown’ by party colleague

“Let’s quote from Mao”, John McDonnell unexpectedly said from the Commons Despatch Box on Wednesday afternoon – to the delight of George Osborne and horror of some Labour MPs.

Osborne, who is desperate to paint McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn as far-left, could not believe his luck.

The shadow chancellor has been branded “a clown” by a Welsh party colleague.

He said: “I was trying to force another issue onto the agenda and I think it’s done that”.

“I’m not sure I’d have quoted him (Mao), he was pretty terrible in many respects”, he said.

McDonnell quoted from the book: “We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are”. We must esteem them as teachers, learning from them respectively and conscientiously.

He provoked uproar when he read from the famous collection of writings by the founder of Communist China and threw the book towards Mr Osborne’s Commons despatch box.

His comment that “the chancellor’s got some front to come and lecture us about deficit reduction” was greeted by howls of laughter from the Tory benches, but this paled in comparison to his somewhat freakish production and then read out a subsequent quote from Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.

“But we must not to pretend to know what we do not know”.

Opening the book, he went on: “Oh look!”

John McDonnell, the main opposition’s finance spokesman, was giving his party’s response to finance minister George Osborne’s budget update in the House of Commons when he pulled out a copy of the Chinese revolutionary leader’s book of quotations, in what was meant to be a humorous stunt.

Mr Osborne opened it, quipped that it was Mr McDonnell’s “personal signed copy” and added: “The problem is half the Shadow Cabinet have been sent off to re-education”.

Angela Eagle, Labour’s shadow business secretary, questioned whether it was “funny or not” and said it “probably backfired”, while Owen Smith, the shadow work and pensions secretary, admitted Chairman Mao was “pretty awful”.

“I never envisioned when it came to nationalising I would be outdone by a conservative chancellor”, McDonnell told MPs as he responded to the chancellor’s Autumn Statement.