John McDonnell, one of the Labour leadership contenders, joked today that he wished he could go back in time to the 1980s and "assassinate Thatcher". The MP for Hayes and Harlington, who was Ken Livingstone's deputy at the Greater London council in the early 1980s, insisted later that his comment about Lady Thatcher, the former Conservative prime minister, was made as a "joke and it went down as a joke". McDonnell, a staunch leftwinger who has earned a reputation as one of the party's leading backbench rebels, made his comment at the Labour leadership hustings organised by the Labour-affiliated GMB...