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If Jeremy Corbyn moves into 10 Downing St, John McDonnell will have the keys to the Chancellor’s residence next door at No 11.

During the heyday of New Labour the two men were serial rebels on the backbenches. But as they made clear at the party conference in Brighton, they see themselves as the leaders of a Government in waiting.

Before the June election, back when there was talk of Theresa May winning a three-figure majority, the notion that Mr McDonnell might take the helm of the Treasury sounded fanciful to many commentators. But now, with the Tories dependent on the DUP and Labour activists pining for another opportunity to go to the polls, people are looking at the Shadow Chancellor in a new way.

They are asking: "Who is the real John McDonnell?"

Is he a Marxist radical who has plotted for decades to grasp control of first the Labour party and then the country? Or is he a family man and committed environmentalist whose ideas about how to build a fairer country happen to be shared by increasing numbers of people in the party and beyond?

Here is a how a Welsh friend describes him

Former Plaid Cymru Westminster leader Elfyn Llwyd counts Mr McDonnell as a friend. They served together on the Justice committee and were both involved in union groups.

Mr Llwyd said: “He is a sincere politician. He is also a sincere socialist.

“When you compare his socialist views with the Blairite views, no doubt he did look a bit like a Marxist, but that’s only because the Blairites had swung to the right and John had stood his ground. I don’t know whether he’s a disciple of Marxism or anything else but I think he is sincere in his politics and I think fairness is at the heart of what he’s about.”

Mr McDonnell – like another famous left-winger – often found himself in the company of Welsh MPs.

“He very often would sit on the Welsh table in the tea room,” Mr Llwyd recalled. “[There] was a room where the Labour people sat but the Welsh table would be at one end of a room occupied by the Lib Dems and also the Tories.

“Oddly enough, it was the table Tony Benn used to sit on as well. He was there frequently and over the years I got to know him fairly well.

“I’ve got the utmost respect for him as a conviction politician.”

He took the first steps to becoming a Catholic priest

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Mr McDonnell has a very different background to Chancellors such as George Osborne and Philip Hammond.

Born in Liverpool in 1951, this son of a bus driver tried for the priesthood but decided he did not have a vocation in the Catholic church. He would soon show signs of a very different calling.

Mr McDonnell took a degree in Government and Politics at Brunel University. He had spent time as a shopfloor production worker and he found jobs with the National Union of Mineworkers and the TUC.

It was not long before he had a chance to jump into electoral politics. In 1981 he won a seat on the Greater London Council (GLC).

He became its chair of finance – a role he described as the equivalent of being made “Chancellor of the Exchequer for London at the age of 29”.

For a time he was leader Ken Livingstone’s deputy but the pair fell out over rate-capping and the use of budget figures. Mr Livingstone claims in his memoirs he warned Mr McDonnell they were in danger of looking like the biggest “liars since Goebbels”.

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Critics lambasted the GLC as a bastion of “loony left” politics and it was abolished in 1986 – a move Mr McDonnell would later describe as “an act of malignant spite by a Prime Minister in the first demented throes of megalomania”.

He became chief executive of the Association of London Government before winning election as the MP for Hayes and Harlington (the home of Heathrow airport) in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide. Mr McDonnell was not caught up in the excitement of Cool Britannia.

In his Who’s Who entry, he described his interests as “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism”. And in 2009 he was so outraged at the lack of a vote on Heathrow expansion that he grabbed the mace and put it down on an empty bench in protest at the “disgrace to the democracy of this country”.

He tried to contest the 2007 and 2010 leadership elections but could not win enough nominations to get on the ballot.

'I don’t think John knows how to slow down'

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It would be a mistake to think of McDonnell as a self-publicist with more interest in grandstanding than parliamentary grind.

Plaid’s Mr Clwyd said: “He is assiduous, he always does his homework and when he was on the Justice Committee he was a regular, prompt attender, always having read through the documents and ready for the committee each time.”

As a constituency MP he has increased his majority in the previously Tory-held seat from 14,291 to 18,115 and in 2013 he suffered what he described as a “minor heart attack”.

Mr Llwyd recalls: “I was very concerned when he had heart trouble... I was one of those urging him to slow down.

“I don’t think John knows how to slow down, anyway. Many of us were concerned he was pushing it a bit too hard.”

Few would have imagined his highest profile days were ahead of him

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He took on the role of campaign manager for Mr Corbyn’s in the aftermath of the 2015 election and helped his friend and fellow jam-maker steamroll over the leadership dreams of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

Soon after his elevation to the post of Shadow Chancellor he was challenged about some of his most controversial statements.

It emerged that in 2010 he had made what he admitted was an “appalling” joke about wanting to go back in time and assassinate Margaret Thatcher. But it was his attitude to IRA violence that became an immediate focus of serious scrutiny.

An apology 'from the bottom of my heart'

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An extract from a 2003 speech surfaced in which he said: “It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.

“The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA. Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands, we now have a peace process.”

He sought to explain the comments saying: “[I] made this speech to a group of republicans because one of the problems we had is that if there was a feeling that they were defeated or humiliated – and this was on both sides – they would not stand down.

“So I made this speech and I urged them to put their weapons away and to participate in the peace process. It was a difficult time.

“I think my choice of words was wrong. I accept that.”

Speaking on the BBC’s Question Time, he said: “If I gave offence – and I clearly have – from the bottom of my heart I apologise. I apologise.”

Big business is alarmed

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The debate about Mr McDonnell’s personal beliefs concerning how an economy and a society should be run is likely to continue for years and will grow in urgency if Labour looks close to taking power.

The CBI responded to his conference speech in which he pledged to bring PFI contracts in-house and renationalise utilities as “the wrong plan at the wrong time”.

His own website contains unequivocal statements about subjects of controversy within the Labour party such as: “John is opposed to nuclear power and campaigns for the scrapping of Trident”.

At times he has encouraged people to see him as a creature of the far left

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In 2011 the Conservative MP Steve Baker made a reference in the Commons to a “reformed Trotskyite”. Mr McDonnell interjected to say: “Some of us are not completely reformed.”

He told MPs he was “attempting not to salvage capitalism but to expose its weaknesses”.

That is not the type of mission statement that the City would want to hear from a Chancellor.

As a backbencher, he probably enjoyed riling both fellow Labour MPs and Conservatives with such comments. But as Shadow Chancellor he has stressed the breadth of his influences.

When asked if he was a Marxist by Andrew Marr, he said: “I believe there’s a lot to learn from reading Kapital, yes of course... But I also believe in the long tradition of the Labour Party which involves people like GDH Cole, Tawney and others.

“You put that altogether and you have, I think, a direction for our economy based upon sound principles of fairness.”

Mr Llwyd said: “He’s by no means a foolish man so for those who [spread] scaremongering that [we’d have] a red hot Trotskyist in No 11, that’s absolutely nonsense.”

He wants 'a new world'

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In his landmark conference speech in Brighton Mr McDonnell gave a more personal example of how he had seen ordinary people touched by the promise of political change.

He said: “My dad was a sergeant in the army and my mum a welder by day, in a munitions factory, and an ARP warden at night. They came out of the war with that spirit of 1945, inspired in them by the election of a Labour Government.”

With passion and emotion, he described how it was his party’s challenge now to “lay the foundations of the new world that awaits us”.

Signalling a move away from judging the success of a country by its GDP, he said the “performance of our Government will be measured by the care we show to all our people and the richness of their lives”.

It is far from certain that Mr McDonnell will get the chance to try and lead such a revolution in Government but he has many thousands of supporters who hope that he will. He has already transformed a party and the young activists who were crowded together in Brighton this time last week want him to change their world.