McVey says she has never had an apology from John McDonald for his lynching comments. “It was never condemned by the party. Ed Miliband never said, 'this isn’t what we should be saying.’ That to me makes the pink bus look like sheer hypocrisy. It makes a mockery of it.” She describes Miliband as a “socialist academic”. His policies “might make a great essay if he was your professor at university, but in real life it doesn’t quite work like that”. She adds: “Life is not a theoretical problem to be solved in class. My Dad always says: anybody can spend money, but it takes a lot of hard work and vision to create money.’”