He told a gathering of Labour party leaders and peers in the House of Lords: "30,000 long term members have left the Labour party, real members of the Labour family, tens of thousands.
But at Monday's gathering of Labour MPs at Westminster, Mr McDonnell stunned MPs by saying they should now vote against the charter, which requires governments to run budget surpluses in "normal times" when the economy is in good shape.
This week's Trades Union Congress (TUC), an annual gathering of organised labour, was a cacophony of truculence.
Amid the gathering of the Labour generations for Michael Foot's funeral this week, one frail figure arrived and left almost unremarked by those in the throng too young to remember when she was a national figure.
Speaking at a gathering of Labour Party leaders and peers in the House of Lords, the Labour peer said "two parties" were developing under Mr Corbyn - one of moderate members and another of the leader's own supporters.
Irrespective of Chilcot's findings, I suspect that the one motive for UK involvement was that conveyed to me by a party grandee, hot foot from Downing Street, at a gathering of then-valued Labour supporters, on the eve of the war: "The bloody yanks are going in anyway, and Tony says we have to be with them to exert a restraining influence".
Ukip members were bullish that the party was still gathering strength at the expense of Labour.
Either way, Britain, or what is left of it, is about to see an awful lot more of Mr Farage's jackanapes grin including at the party's eagerly awaited annual gathering later this month, in Doncaster, parliamentary seat of Labour's leader Ed Miliband.
On a hill outside Johannesburg thousands of labour activists are gathering for the national conference of the trade union federation Cosatu - against a backdrop of continuing unrest in the mining industry, and pointed questions about role and relevance of mainstream unions, and their cosy relationship with government.
The main outcome of the gathering was the foundation of the Red International of Labour Unions, often known as the "Profintern".
Speaking to a gathering of small businesses at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, McDonnell said he suspected the government would enact article 50 "towards the end of next year", but that a lack of direction was having a detrimental impact on small business.
