Great news for Labour: Jeremy Corbyn is now being advised by a Greek biker and a Marxist hack

“I think the way Greece has been treated is terrible and we should reach out to them,” said Corbyn. That was how the Labour Party came to be providing outdoor relief for out-of-work failed Marxist finance ministers like Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis leaving Greece's Ministry of Finance after his resignation

Let us put it at its gentlest, and say that the Labour Party needs to do some work to persuade floating voters that it can be trusted to run the economy. Many reasonable people feel that George Osborne is not a reassuring caretaker of the spreadsheets and these voters might be open to suggestions that there is a better way to manage the national finances. To whom, then, can Jeremy Corbyn turn to help win over the doubters?

One can imagine the conversation in the leader’s office. We need someone who is a trained economist, with experience of government at the highest level and preferably with a bit of rock-star charisma. Luckily, said John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, we have just the right person. I’ve signed him up for my new economics lecture tour: Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek former finance minister. He wears leather jackets and he’s into motorbikes.

Good, said Corbyn, and announced in an interview with his local Islington newspaper that Varoufakis would be advising Labour. He wasn’t sure how, exactly, but he was helping “in some capacity”. He explained: “Varoufakis is interesting, because he has obviously been through all the negotiations.”

This is true. Varoufakis tried to reschedule Greece’s debts with the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. He then advocated a No vote in the Greek referendum last year, to reject the deal Greece was offered. The Greek people voted No, but then he resigned anyway, because the leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, wanted someone else to renegotiate the deal.

“I think the way Greece has been treated is terrible and we should reach out to them,” said Corbyn. That was how the Labour Party came to be providing outdoor relief for out-of-work failed Marxist finance ministers.

I am not sure if my reconstruction of that critical meeting in Corbyn’s office is exactly right. The Times recently reported that the Labour leader doesn’t like meetings, doesn’t say much if they are forced on him and leaves most of the talking to McDonnell and Seumas Milne, Corbyn's director of communications. This is transparent Murdoch propaganda, manufactured because the Tory press are terrified.

The truth is almost certainly that Corbyn is a revelation in meetings. He takes control and drives his colleagues to produce their best. The kindly uncle persona is a clever front, I would have been told if any of his people spoke to me. When McDonnell revealed that he had signed up Varoufakis, for example, what really happened is that Corbyn said: A Marxist economist is excellent, but why should we be satisfied with just one? Get me another.

Which is why McDonnell’s new economics lecture tour will also be joined by Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism and newly liberated from the impartiality requirements of public service broadcasting at Channel 4 News.

Typically, the dull-witted Chancellor of the Exchequer fell straight into Corbyn and McDonnell’s trap. In the House of Commons yesterday, he said: “Presumably they chose those two because Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse was busy.” Osborne made a fool of himself by describing Mason as a “revolutionary Marxist”, insinuating that he favours the violent overthrow of democracy. I know perfectly well that Mason is a persuasive and engaging historical materialist who gave up all thought of the violent struggle a long time ago. “I’m quite happy to call myself a Marxist at the level of method,” he told me when I interviewed him last year, “because historical materialism as a method is a great tool for understanding history, but as a theory of crisis, as I explain in the book, I think it is inadequate.”

I am sure that will reassure those parts of the electorate who want to vote Labour but who are worried that it may have gone off on a voyage of intellectual discovery.

I have read Mason’s book and I can see why he is so popular with many of the people who voted for Corbyn as Labour leader. It is a lively, challenging onslaught on an imaginary enemy called ‘neoliberalism’, and it sets out tantalising glimpses of the prospect of some kind of economic organisation beyond capitalism. When I met him, I was unable to gain much greater understanding of these momentous ideas, but I am sure that was my failing, as a lifelong Labour rightwinger, rather than his.

I am less familiar with the work of Professor Varoufakis. I am sure that it is not his fault that Syriza betrayed the people who voted for it by coming to terms with Greece’s creditors. It cannot be that Syriza made impossible promises of repudiating the nation’s debts and staying in the euro, can it? If only Tsipras had let him carry on, Greece would probably not be the basket case it still is.

However, those who are worried about Labour’s economic credibility need not be alarmed that the party is seeking advice from someone who ran a country in the eurozone. “I realise we’re not in the eurozone,” Corbyn told his local newspaper, “but it’s a question of understanding how we challenge the notion that you can cut your way to prosperity when in reality you have to grow your way to prosperity.”

Funnily enough that was exactly the advice that Varoufakis said he would not be giving when he appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics last year: “My advice is to shift away from the narrative of austerity – pro-austerity, anti-austerity. Austerity is not the issue.” Good grief. If austerity is not the issue then Corbyn and McDonnell have been howling at the wrong moon for quite some time.

So what is the issue? “Corbyn has to revive the Harold Wilson strategy of the Sixties of reinventing Labour’s values in the context of a technologically-driven investment programme,” Varoufakis told the show.

Hmmm. I know this is happening only in my own head, but it is at this point in the meeting that Corbyn turns to McDonnell and says, “I wonder if there is anybody else who has an alternative to Osborne’s economics and who could help to popularise it.”