Friends: The one where John McDonnell is nice to Communists

“If you ask me why I loved him, I feel that it can only be explained by replying: ‘Because it was him; because it was me’.”

The 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s summation of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, who was also a gifted philosopher, was so often reproduced that eventually it passed into popular cliché – it even makes a rather crass appearance in the 2017 film ‘Call me by your name’ – partly because it fuses pithiness and banality. Truly great friendships assume some sort of mystical universal significance.

Montaigne and de La Boétie were young men of extraordinary talents and inhabited the same intellectual world, the nascent French Renaissance. They were both the product of the minor aristocracy near Bordeaux. It is not so very remarkable that they became friends, and yet there was something remarkable about the bond they formed that went far beyond mere familiarity. Boétie died at the age of 32, and Montaigne never again formed a friendship as close as that which he found with him.

Bear that in mind. On Newsnight this week, the BBC’s Emily Maitliss asked the shadow chancellor John McDonnell whether he could be friends with a Tory. His response has been much commented on.

“I work with Tories on the basis of cross-party agreements etc,” he said. “I’m perfectly civil and I’m perfectly willing to engage in conversation. But, to be frank, at the moment with regard to the Conservative Party as it now stands, and for all that they’ve done to our community, the suffering that they’ve caused. I can’t forgive them. I can’t forgive them. It’s not about tribalism, it’s being honest with people about what this government has done.”

The response from assorted Twitter luminaries was almost completely predictable. Here’s Brian Cox, television scientist: “If you struggle to be friends with someone of the ‘opposite political persuasion’ then it seems to me that you believe a one party state is the way forward – because the only ‘good’ people are people who agree with you. Certainty suggests hubris – doubt suggests wisdom.”

And the actor Eddie Marsan: “There are some people who agree with me politically and they are f**king horrible, and there are others I disagree with politically and they’re lovely.”

I wonder how far this kind of even-handed fair-mindedness from Remainer Cox extends to Brexiteers. But hey, that’s not the real problem here, because McDonnell is right in a funny way in just the same way that “I’m friends with everyone” is wrong. Real friendship never flourishes in an atmosphere of faux neutrality. It emerges, as Montaigne knew, only in the most exceptional conditions.

He wrote, in his essay On Friendship: “Moreover, what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships, bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together, so that it cannot be found.”

It happens once, perhaps twice in a lifetime: “Because it was him; because it was me.” And indeed, I would be slightly discombobulated if I found that McDonnell, a life-long activist of the New Left, was bosom pals with a convinced Thatcherite.

But it is interesting to note the figures who populate McDonnell’s realm of familiarity and approval. There’s Corbyn’s far left communications chief Seumas Milne, who in 2001 portrayed war crimes committed in the Balkans conflict of the 1990s in the following terms. “The new Belgrade administration dug up corpses to order.” And Ken Livingstone (“he was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”) and Communist and leading Corbyn adviser Andrew Murray who once wrote of the “basic position of solidarity with People’s Korea [North Korea].”

Can you be close friends with people whose politics you detest? Probably not. But this is for certain – John McDonnell is familiar with some of the most noxious elements of British politics.