PHILIP HAMMOND provokes surprising emotions for somebody so bland. Brexiteers demonise him as the saboteur-in-chief. Anti-Brexiteers praise him as a voice of sanity. But one thing all agree on is that he is one-dimensional: pro-business but averse to ideology, cautious but given to technical tricks, unimaginative, plodding, parsimonious. What you see is what you get.

The same cannot be said of his Labour opposite number. John McDonnell is a hair’s breadth away from becoming chancellor. Labour reckons the government is so weak that it could collapse within a year. He also has the makings of an especially powerful chancellor. Mr Hammond is hamstrung by his poor relations with Theresa May, who made no secret of wanting to get rid of him if the June election had gone to plan. Mr McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have been joined hip-and-thigh for 35 years, united both by shared politics and by complementary skills. Mr Corbyn is an idealist who cultivates an image of sanctity. Mr McDonnell is an ideologue who gets things done. A future Labour government will be more of a McDonnell than a Corbyn one.

Moreover, Mr McDonnell has changing opinion on his side. The unimaginative Mr Hammond is like a priest of a dying religion, repeating formulae that once moved people’s hearts but have long since petrified. Mr McDonnell knows he is swimming with the tide. The full impact of the financial crisis on British politics was delayed because Labour was in power when it struck and the Tories did a good job of blaming the subsequent recession on its overspending. But the Tories have since come to own not just austerity but the very system that created the crisis.

The chancellor-in-waiting is a confusing figure because there are at least four McDonnells to choose from. The most familiar is a Marxist ideologue who got his training in politics in three engines of the hard left: the National Union of Mineworkers, where he worked as a researcher; the Greater London Council, where he served as deputy leader under “Red” Ken Livingstone until he was sacked for being too hard-line; and the Campaign Group of left-wing MPs, where he first forged links with Mr Corbyn. Mr McDonnell liked having his hands on the levers of power. At the GLC he ran the budget while Mr Livingstone did the posturing. But getting his hands dirty didn’t mean compromising his enthusiasm for the true religion. “I’m straight up. I’m honest with people,” he once said. “I’m a Marxist.”

Yet the closer he gets to power, the more Honest John plays down his Marxist youth, which somehow lasted until he was in his 60s, and plays up three other images instead. The first is the ever-so-sensible bank manager. The suit-and-tie that identified Mr McDonnell as the commissar among a rabble of rumpled idealists now marks him as a respectable guardian of other people’s money. He promises to exercise “iron discipline” over day-to-day government spending. He admits higher spending means higher taxes (though he’s wrong to think that all the money can be raised from taxing companies and the rich). He invokes the authority of the IMF to justify more public spending—or, as he puts it, borrowing to invest in the nation’s productive capacity. Describing his own “shadow” budget on November 16th, Mr McDonnell even claimed that big businesses are “coming to us for reassurance about the long-term future of our economy”.

The second is a mainstream European Social Democrat. Mr McDonnell likes to emphasise that his preferred policies, such as higher public spending and public ownership of the utilities, are centrist stuff in continental Europe. This is disingenuous, as Mr McDonnell, a long-standing opponent of the European Union as a capitalist club, knows. British public spending may be lower than the EU average, but many European countries have gone further in introducing market mechanisms into the welfare state. Sweden has contracted out the management of many schools and hospitals to private companies, Denmark has introduced a version of a school voucher system, and France has some of the world’s most successful private-sector utilities. But it goes down well with liberal-minded Remainers who are desperately looking for an excuse to dump the Tories.

The third is the New Thinker determined to “rewrite the rules of our economy” for a world of smart machines and destabilising capital flows. He regularly name-checks heavyweight left-wing intellectuals such as Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty and cogitates on such fashionable subjects as corporate short-termism and the gig economy. This allows him to repackage himself not as a hangover from the old left but as a harbinger of the new progressivism that revives the socialist tradition for a changing world. It also lets him argue that the real dinosaurs are Tories like Mr Hammond who, for all their talk of the digital revolution, still believe that Milton Friedman is the latest word in economics. “Socialism with an iPad” is one of his favourite slogans.

The real McCoy

Mr McDonnell is bringing a growing self-confidence to his juggling act. One minute he is dining in the City with the lions of capitalism, the next he is addressing his ideological allies in mass meetings. But it is still unclear whether he can sustain it. Labour is only neck-and-neck with the Conservatives despite the government’s innumerable problems: indeed, one poll this week had the Tories four points ahead. The City is even more petrified of Chancellor McDonnell than of a hard Brexit. His inner circle of advisers includes some odd choices for a man trying to reinvent economics, such as Mr Corbyn’s son Seb. Economic stars such as Mr Stiglitz and Mr Piketty are too busy on the lecture circuit to devote time to policymaking. Mr McDonnell’s lectures flit from one fascinating subject to another without providing substantive arguments. It is almost as if the true face is the Marxist who spent 35 years on the fringes of his party, whereas the other three are simply masks, put on to fool the voters.