John McDonnell has again refused to apologise for calling Esther McVey a “stain on humanity” and repeating that she should be “lynched”. The Shadow Chancellor was asked to apologise to McVey on Marr this morning but refused – worth remembering he also refused to at the time, contrary to his defence this morning. Marr threatened to play back the audio. A guilty McDonnell replied:

“No we don’t need to, I know exactly what was on it.”

Bewilderingly, McDonnell was then let off the hook – the audio was not played.

I think that’s a distortion of what happened. We raised the EM comments – as we have on numerous occasions – and asked him to clear them up once and for all. As part of that we wanted to see whether the audio was something he wanted to call in evidence. He didn’t.

— Rob Burley (@RobBurl) 21 January 2018

Here it is:

Here is the clip of @johnmcdonnellMP from 2014 repeating comments about ‘lynching’ Tory MP Esther McVey #bbcsp pic.twitter.com/92MJTbYLX9

— BBC Daily Politics and Sunday Politics (@daily_politics) 14 January 2018

Hard man McDonnell can dish it out but can’t take it…