The shadow chancellor on why Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party remains the natural political home for Britain’s Catholics

John McDonnell’s intellectual debt to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky has been widely publicised. But not – until now – his debt to the Catholicism of his youth.

After a childhood steeped in the apparently unchanging world of pre-conciliar Catholicism, Labour’s shadow chancellor admits to being enthralled as the Second Vatican Council unfolded between 1962 and 1965, opening up the Church to the world in a way that was to transform it.

“Those three or four years in my early teens were absolutely critical to me,” he reveals. “The combination of the Beatles and Pope John XXIII made it an extraordinary experience to be a teenager. Despite no longer believing in a God, I carry the values of the Catholic Church with me, and I’ve carried them with me throughout.”

The far Left and Catholicism have usually been on opposite sides of the barricades, since even before the French Revolution. Most socialists see Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, setting out the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, as a land grab. They haven’t forgotten the Church’s concordat with Hitler and its backing for numerous theocratic dictatorships in the twentieth century. But, for McDonnell, John XXIII changed all that.