This is taken from The Times. It reports Bob Crow as saying: “The unions are planning to set up an alliance to stand candidates at the next general election.” The RMT has already had six meetings in the past three months with representatives from other unions, pensioners groups, student bodies and green campaigners.”

I’ve not reproduced the silly questions at the bottom of the interview but offered the choice “Churchill or Lenin” Bob picks the right one.

New unions, forget it. Bob Crow is a traditionalist in an open-neck shirt with a medallion. The headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union are covered with good, old-fashioned memorabilia. There are paintings of steam trains, embroidered banners and a trophy cabinet filled with silver cups from darts competitions. In the boardroom there are individual blotting pads and solid oak chairs.

A sign on the door to the general secretary’s office reads: “Working class”. Inside, Mr Crow has a moose’s head, a bust of Lenin and a pair of Alan Minter’s boxing gloves on display. There are tributes to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and a brick from the house of the man who wrote The Red Flag. On the wall hangs a framed newspaper front page headlined: “Last stand of the dinosaurs”. On the table is a copy of The Morning Star.

This is the “red menace” of the trade union movement, the shaven-headed Millwall fan whose nickname is “Crow Bar”. But in fact he is polite, courteous and punctual and horrified at being thought of as a bruiser. “I don’t think I’m aggressive, except when it comes to negotiating,” he tells us.

His hobby is meteorology — he has two barometers at home. He enjoys cooking curries and roast dinners, although he admits: “I couldn’t come in at 7 o’clock at night and start doing all that lark.” In his spare time he watches sport and reads biographies. “The ballet’s not my cup of tea, although if someone offered me a ticket I would go and have a look at it. I am not into flower arranging, but I do like gardening.”

He has a romantic side — when he first spotted his girlfriend 18 years ago, he asked a friend for her number, phoned her and said: “There’s a lamppost under where you live. If you look out of your window and think you’ll be safe with me then come down.”

He admires 1940s black and white films. “Greta Garbo once said that the men who think they’re macho aren’t really macho at all,” he says. “That’s true. Some people go around puffing their chest out saying it’s a man’s world. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’m very soft with my daughters, they’re grown up now, but they can always work on my heart.”

This is, however, the man who has caused misery to commuters delayed by strikes. The Evening Standard called him “the most hated man in London” and Boris Johnson once said that he was demented. There is no doubt that his politics are as old-fashioned as his office.

Mr Crow is still proud to call himself a communist and loves the idea that he might retire to Havana. “You can be a communist and not be a member of the Communist Party just like you [can] go to the British Virgin Islands and not be a virgin,” he says. “I think communism is working well. If you go to Cuba you might not get everything you want in the shops, but if you drop down with a heart attack you will get first-class medical treatment.”

The recession, he believes, has made everyone more left-wing: “When people realised the magnitude of what was taking place, it made a huge difference. People started saying ‘how can bankers earn that kind of money when agency nurses are on £6.35 an hour?’.”

Unlike some leftwingers, Mr Crow does not think that the Government could control City pay. He does, though, want to create a “socialist society where the main aspirations of people are given: they have a job, a decent wage, a house, healthcare, good education and no wars”.

He is convinced that public opinion is moving his way. “People are beginning to say ‘something ain’t right here. There isn’t enough money [for the public services] yet we can find billions of pounds for the bankers just like that’. It demonstrates to me that whoever has muscle at the end of the day gets what they want. It’s a jungle out there. That is why I make no excuses about taking industrial action to look after our members.”

As a daily Tube traveller, Mr Crow suffers from his own industrial action. “I know how frustrating it is, but when people come up and complain about delays I say — ‘I don’t run the Tube, I only represent the workers’.”

Big sporting events, such as the Olympics, should not, he insists, be protected from strikes. Nor will his union give Gordon Brown a break in the run-up to the general election. “We used to batten down the hatches before an election but, because Labour have not done anything for us, if something happens right up to polling day we are going to look after our members.”

The RMT no longer helps to fund Labour. There are, Mr Crow said very few of his members who back the party any more. He is scathing about the Prime Minister. “Labour, Tory, Lib Dems are all the same under their suits. They all support privatisations and anti-union laws. The political debate now is all about who is going to cut more from public spending. Brown and Blair just masqueraded as Labour and then put the knife into the unions.” Jon Cruddas and Harriet Harman are, in his view, the best of a bad bunch. “It’s not about coming over all smiley, but having policies that are in tune with working people. Political parties represent classes of people and if you stop representing your class and they feel under-represented, they will start going somewhere else. Where they are drifting at the moment is to the BNP.”

Now Mr Crow is planning a new challenge to the political elite. The unions, he says, are planning to set up an alliance to stand candidates at the next general election. The RMT has already had six meetings in the past three months with representatives from other unions, pensioners groups, student bodies and green campaigners. “If we don’t believe that any of the candidates are good, there may be an alliance that comes together. We would be putting up policies that we believe people want. What our members vote for is their democratic right, but certainly we can’t just sit back and say vote Labour.”

He cannot lead the alliance himself — “my rules restrict me from standing at a general election,” he says — but he can help with the manifesto and fundraising, while his preferred policies are clear. “I would like to see taxes go up massively for the rich, I’d abolish all private education and all private medical care. I would do away with the Royal Family — that’s not to say they’d be executed but why should those people have a privileged place in society
?”

Mr Crow is proud to be a class warrior. He thinks John Prescott, the former RMT man who once rented a flat from the union, sold out when he said that everyone was middle class. “He doesn’t represent the workers, he came here on the eve of the Iraq war with two armed bodyguards and said ‘Bob can you sort out my bath at home it’s leaking?’. What does middle class mean? At the end of the day you are a worker or you are an employer. Either you own the production, or you work the production.”

This self-appointed champion of the workers has no Old Etonian friends. “People with titles don’t often mix with my company,” he says. “I don’t mind them, though. One thing I can’t stand is snobbery and snobbery works both ways — rich looking down at poor and poor looking up at rich saying ‘he speaks a bit different’. It doesn’t bother me if they have a privileged background. Tony Benn is one of my heroes. Fidel Castro was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”