No one should be surprised by such tactics and by the values that give rise to them. Intimidation and bullying are trademark tactics whenever the British hard Left get anywhere near power, as veterans of the battles with Militant in the 1980s will attest.

As chair of Greater London Council’s finance committee in the early 1980s, McDonnell’s plan to set an illegal budget, plunging the capital into Liverpool-like financial chaos, was only halted because he was sacked. As an MP he opposed the Good Friday Agreement on the basis that “an assembly is not what people have laid down their lives for over thirty years… the settlement must be for a united Ireland.”

His “apology” to the Question Time audience last year was forced out of him after it was revealed that he had suggested that IRA terrorists be honoured for their part in the “armed struggle”. He has endorsed “insurrection” as a legitimate way of changing the government and he was sympathetic to the young thug who nearly killed a police officer during a student demonstration in 2010 by throwing a fire extinguisher from the top of a tall building.