This week, as London ground to a halt for 48 hours, RMT leader Bob Crow was accused of holding a gun to the city's head. He speaks about the reasons for the strike, his ill‑timed trip to Rio and why he still lives in a council house

By the time my turn comes to file into his office, Bob Crow has been giving back-to-back interviews for hours, and has the beleaguered air of a man worn out by relentless questions. Who could blame him? All week the RMT's general secretary has been battling to explain why his members were on strike, closing down the London Underground for 48 hours, while Boris Johnson has been hard at it all over the airwaves, too, accusing Crow of "holding a gun" to a the city's head. Incapable of sitting down together to resolve the dispute, the media's two favourite cartoon characters ended up communicating via a radio phone-in.

But by the time I leave Crow's office, I'm no longer sure it makes much sense to be interviewing either of them. From what I can gather, neither fully knows what's going on, nor has the power to sort it out. The person we should probably be bombarding with questions is the boss of London Underground Limited (LUL), a man so unaccountably absent from the whole row that I couldn't even name him without consulting Google.

Most news coverage says the RMT is on strike to stop 950 ticket office staff losing their jobs, but the full picture is, of course, less straightforward. On November 22 the RMT received a regulation HR1 form announcing that the closure of all ticket offices was going to incur 953 redundancies. Crow brandishes the form angrily, but isn't even clear who sent it.

"Well, we don't know." He says it came from LUL: "But when we go and see London Transport, they say their authority to shut this down comes from the very top." But Johnson denied any knowledge of the form when challenged this week by Crow, and appeared quite ignorant of its existence. "He said: 'It's nothing to do with me, it's down to the negotiators.' So who knows?" Yet apparently the whole dispute boils down to this crumpled piece of paper in Crow's hand.

"You see, now they're saying there's going to be only 400 jobs going this year, and a further 500 the following year. Now why would they send a letter over saying 950 that they didn't have to? They could have said 400, and that would be a more manageable figure. They could have done the rest when the second tranche comes through next year. But they've sent this over." Having issued the form, LUL is legally obliged to consult and consider counter proposals to the redundancy plan. "And they haven't listened one iota, or changed anything."

Nor have they categorically confirmed that the "no compulsory redundancies" deal previously struck with the RMT will apply. But nor have they said it won't. Crow seems confident that those staff who want to leave will all get voluntary redundancy with a severance package, and new jobs will be found on the underground for all those who don't. The crux of the RMT's objection is that LUL "haven't told us what they intend doing with these people. Where they intend putting them. What their jobs will be. What their pay will be."

This sounds like a startlingly modest matter to resolve. "Yeah, absolutely," Crow agrees. "They ain't got to find any money to resolve this, none whatsoever. All they need to do is put a process in place." And he thinks it's worth bringing the capital to a halt over that?

"We've made more progress in the last 24 hours than we have in the last three months. Because they haven't listened to us. Now suddenly they're taking us seriously. And the only reason they're taking us seriously is because we've got a strike." Crow considers the strike a resounding success, "because now they're going to sit down and hear what we have to say".

If that's the case, then Londoners deserve an explanation from LUL for its refusal to engage with the union. In fact, Crow explains, he himself doesn't even play any part in the negotiations; post-privatisation, the RMT now has to deal with more than 500 different companies, so the role of negotiating has been devolved down to local level. But it appears that no one has been talking to anyone. "If we'd had an opportunity to speak to the mayor, at least we could have briefed him on exactly what we are in dispute about." So why didn't Crow accept Johnson's invitation on Monday to call off the strike and sit down with him to talk? "Because if we hadn't gone on strike, we wouldn't be sitting down at Acas on Friday. And because, don't forget, the last time we had a strike he said: 'Call it off and we'll meet you,' and he never met me. He's never met me. He won't let us meet."

Crow says the RMT has made several formal requests for a meeting with the mayor, and been refused every time. When the pair met on the panel of Radio 4's Any Questions, Crow took him aside afterwards. "I said to him: 'Boris, look, we don't want to negotiate with you. You'll probably disagree with 90% of me and I'll disagree with 90% of you.' All we want is the opportunity to meet a couple of times a year – everyone else does. The sweetshop commerce people who look after all the little businesses – they meet the mayor on a regular basis and put their point of view over. He's met 86 bankers since he's been mayor. But he won't meet the trade unions."

What Crow wants from the mayor sounds eminently reasonable. "I'd like to see him call a conference of passengers, the employers, trade unions, disability groups, and say, 'This is my vision for London Underground over the next 10 years. What are your views?', and we could all chip in. Every single group attending that conference would want to grow the London Underground. That's what you should do as mayor of London. Not all these publicity stunts. He should be talking to all the democratic groups in London society about how best London should run."

What sounds less reasonable, and more like playground tit-for-tat, is Crow's defence of his response to management failings. I ask if his union has a responsibility to be proportionate. "Good point," he nods. "But the employer should then look at how disproportionate it's being, 'cos it came along and announced 950 jobs when it didn't intend to get rid of 950 jobs in the first year, it was over two years."

But the RMT discovered this way back in early December. Surely the leadership could then have reassured its members that the situation was less serious than first thought, and encouraged heads to cool. "That's what we said last week. They could have withdrawn that notice last week and we wouldn't have been in dispute. They served the notice on us! We didn't ask for it."

He's in danger, I say, of coming across as petty. "Well, it is petty, but it takes two to tango. All the things you are saying – it's so near to agreement, could be so easily resolved – yes, it is so near to agreement. But if the other side won't agree, then you've had it."

Crow claims public sympathy is with him, and cites the RMT's own opinion polls, which appear to bear this out. But when I wonder why the LUL's polls produced mysteriously contradictory results, he says both sides' surveys are equally meaningless. "People will use what figures they want to use. You can do what you want with them." So why bother commissioning polls? "'Cos they done one. To say: 'Right, you've done a poll, we'll do a poll. You do a poll, we'll do a poll.' You can do as many polls as you want. The only poll I'm concerned about is our members."

I'm not convinced that last point is entirely true. When I interviewed Crow three years ago, he came across as self-aware and controlled, and, on the whole, intellectually coherent. The contrast is so striking that a whisper currently circulating within the transport industry begins to seem quite plausible. Sources say Crow is actually quite a moderate and flexible trade unionist, but must play the intransigent militant to pacify hardcore members of the RMT's executive committee, or else he'll be out of a job. I put this to him, and for a moment he looks taken aback, before his expression tightens into the first and only smile of the entire interview.

"What, you're saying we've got a hard-left executive? Well, if so it's certainly got a soft centre," he laughs. "Well, that's absolute rubbish isn't it? I've got nothing to worry about." But then, interestingly, he adds: "I mean, I might not even stand for election next time. I've got nothing to worry about."

He is planning to stand for re-election in 2016? "At the moment I am. But that may change. I'm not going to be hanging around for ever. I won't be one of these people like Lenin in a mausoleum."

If he does stand down, Britain will lose one of the last socialist household names it has left. Labour expelled the RMT 10 years ago, so he "doesn't give two hoots" about the party's plans to reform its relationship with the unions. He does, however, warn Ed Miliband to think carefully, if he wants union members to opt in, before allowing any more shadow frontbenchers to make comments like Harriet Harman, who said she'd like to knock Johnson and Crow's heads together. "What she should have said is who she supports. Is she on the side of Boris, or on the side of the RMT?" Presumably she would say she was on the passengers' side. "Yeah, but when it comes to the crunch, which side are you on?"

He sees himself as waging class war in his job every day, fully endorses Denis Healey's old ambition to squeeze the rich "until the pips squeak", and defines a rich person as anyone earning more than £100,000. But Crow's salary package comes to £145,000, so I ask him to explain how he justifies living in a council house. "Well, why shouldn't I?" Because by his own definition he is rich, and there are 14,000 homeless families in desperate need of an affordable home. "The real big problem here is not me living in a council house, but that both Labour and the Tories failed to build council houses, and sold them off." He's quite right, I agree, but as a committed socialist … "Well, where does it say that a socialist can't live in a council house then?" he interrupts. "Did Karl Marx write that in one of his volumes?" But he of all people must see that homeless families crammed into squalid hostels are in greater need of a subsidised house than he? "Well, why can't all those Tories who've got three or four houses open up those houses to people who need them?"

It's baffling that someone so dedicated to the socialist cause could be so deaf to the political impact of his own personal choices. Does he not realise that his example is the first thing Tories cite to justify their proposal to cap council house eligibility at £55,000? "Well, they're going to do it anyway," he retorts.

Did he not realise, similarly, how photos of him sunbathing on Copocabana beach would look to Londoners stranded in gridlock three days later? "I've got nothing to defend." I'm not attacking him for taking a holiday, I keep saying, but am just curious to understand how he reconciled such a PR gift to his enemies with his desire for the strike to succeed.

'Our members weren't bothered … I've got nothing to defend' … Bob Crow on holiday in Brazil. Photograph: Chris Bott/Solo Syndication

First he says the timing never even occurred to him; then he says of course it did. "But our members weren't bothered." He doesn't, I repeat, need to defend his right to go on holiday. "Well, I've got nothing to defend." But no matter how many times I repeat that I'm not attacking it, he keeps defending it. "If I wasn't in Rio I wouldn't be playing any part in those negotiations." I know! "The fact of the matter is it's absolutely irrelevant to negotiations." I know!

When he eventually explains why he thought it pointless to worry about how his holiday might play with the media, it's the only time he allows a glimpse of how deeply Fleet Street has hurt him.

"Well, if it weren't the Rio holiday they'd be saying something about 'Bob comes to work in jeans and a Fred Perry top.' If I'm walking around in a suit they go: 'Look at him, he's done well for himself walking around in a Savile Row suit, he should be wearing a Fred Perry.' They will use any argument they want to try and humiliate me, and try and make me basically look bad, and try and make me small."