'If anybody says it is nice to be hated, they're lying'

'Ere's a classic," says Bob Crow, aka Big Bad Bob, aka the Crowbar, aka the Most Hated Man in London. The general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers union is providing a guided tour of his office, just a spit and a cough from two great London tube landmarks, Euston and King's Cross. There's the bust of Lenin (his bust of Marx was nicked by a Marxist thief), tributes to Che and Fidel, boxing gloves from Alan Minter, painted plates in honour of striking miners and those who fought fascism at Cable Street in the 1930s, a photo of his 15-year-old daughter, Tanya, model trains, gold-braid union sashes presented to branch officials in the 1920s, and a brick from the house of Jim Connell, who wrote The Red Flag, inscribed with its opening verse "The people's flag is deepest red/ It shrouded oft our martyred dead".

Crow has stopped at a cartoon that appeared in the London Evening Standard, and shows a tube map drawn along new lines. "Absolute classic, this one. Look, you got the Militant Line, the Far Left Line, Bolshy Line, Greedy Fat Bastards Line, the Blackmail Line. Hahahaha! Brilliant!"

In a week when BA employees were asked to work for nothing and 900 workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire were sacked for unofficial strike action, Crow looms larger than ever - as Scargill redux, an old-fashioned trade union tyrant, or a workers' hero, depending on your perspective, and how keen you are to get into work on time.

Last week Crow almost brought London to a stop. Again. Two days' strike action cost the economy an estimated £100m. London's mayor, Boris Johnson, called him "demented" and throughout his tenure has refused to talk to him. The Sun newspaper sent a red double-decker bus round to his house to block his way to work, and give the public the chance to berate him. His enemies say he is a bully who regularly holds London to ransom. So do some of his friends.

Crow's RMT is widely regarded as a militant sore. No wonder. His successes are undeniable - in the seven years he has led the union, membership has increased (from 50,000 to over 80,000) almost as fast as workers' salaries. He even managed to get Network Rail to reintroduce a final salary pension scheme.

This week he's been in talks with the tube bosses. Next week he'll be in intensive talks. Yes, of course, he hopes to reach a settlement. No, of course, he's not ruling out further action. He insists that the dispute has been misreported. The RMT did not demand 5% - its claim was for "inflation plus" when inflation was 4%. The dispute is primarily about protecting a no-compulsory redundancy scheme; Crow believes 4,000 of the tube's 22,000 jobs are at risk.

What would he say if his members were asked to work for nothing? "Am I allowed to swear? I'd tell them to fuck off. Over the last two years, BA made around £900m profit one year and £500m the other. It's an absolute scandal."

To an extent Crow is a victim of his own success. The public seems to have little support for tube workers because they think they are already well rewarded. Is it true that drivers earn a basic £40,000? He looks at me, wide-eyed, as if he can't quite believe the question. "Yeah! But we've got people on far more than that. Technical officers and signal workers are on £54,000. Basic. For a flat week. All pensionable."

Blimey, I say. He gives me another look. "When I see Ronaldo earns half a million quid a month and he gets a signing on fee of £8m, and people say train drivers are greedy working nine hours downstairs in them kind of temperatures all day long. Nah. I think it's the rate for the job. The reality is it's a jungle out there."

Crow, who earns £80,000, is sitting in his huge leather armchair. If the Sopranos was remade in Britain you could do worse than cast him as Tony - shaved bullet head, huge arms, the hard man's splayed legs, a scarily soft handshake. Around his neck he wears a golden pair of boxing gloves. His summer shirt is loose and baggy, his trousers casual, and his sneakers carefully colour co-ordinated - a distinctive kind of dapper. Somehow you know he's going to be a Millwall football fan.

Crow is a keen sportsman. He works out six days a week, and still plays five-a-side. When I ask who his sporting hero is, he instantly points to a framed picture of Millwall legend Terry Hurlock. "He's a friend of mine. Absolute hero. He was a very, very hard player, but a very, very intelligent player." As a footballer, has Crow got more of Hurlock's hardness or intelligence? "Oh, his hardness. Imagine a stick of rock, and it says 'Blackpool for ever', well he had Millwall right the way through him." Cut Crow in half and you'd probably find "No Surrender".

When England played Andorra last week the tubes were on strike. One banner at Wembley read "Bob Crow is a ******". Did he see it? "Oh yeah, it had six digits in it. Someone said to me it meant Bob crow is Golden." He grins. "I understand that Fabio Capello wrote a letter to the bus workers, praising them for the extra workers they put on for the strike. I had a lot of time for Fab until then, but he actually supported strike breakers so he's not one of my favourites no more. I shall remind the Italian trade union movement when I meet them of what he done."

What's it like to be known as the most hated man in London? Crow, normally a motormouth, pauses. "Well, number one, if anybody says it is nice to be known as hated, they're lying." He pauses again. "But I'm not hated. They're lying. I'm not the most hated. I tell you what, I've been travelling around on the trains, and I don't get no aggro at all."

Perhaps people are scared of you? "No, people actually come up to me and say, 'Why are the trains running late Bob,' and I say to them 'I'm not responsible for running the trains. I wish I was, but I'm not.'"

The Times ran an editorial stating that Crow was class obsessed, and he says for once it was correct. "Yeah, spot on. Dead right they was on that. I am obsessed with workers. I'm not obsessed with bosses - I don't represent them."

Crow, 48, was born in Shadwell, east London, and his family moved to Hainault on the London/Essex border when he was an infant. His father was a docker; trade unionism was the norm in his family. He left school at 16, working for London Underground as a track repairer. A spat with his gang leader at 19 politicised him. He felt he was being picked on, went to his branch meeting to complain, and that was that. He joined the branch committee, was sent to trade union school to swot up, and fell in love with the movement. In 1983 he became local representative of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and began a four-year fling with the Communist party. In 1990 the NUR merged with the National Union of Seamen to form the RMT, and in 2002 he was elected by the membership to succeed Jimmy Knapp as general secretary. He says he adores his job.

Even when the mayor of London calls him demented? He laughs, and tells me he was recently interviewed on Channel 4 news and Johnson was on a video link-up - when the mayor was told Crow was in the studio he said it was a set-up, and left. "He walked away with all these wires hanging from him. He looked like Frankenstein! Hahahaha!"

Ken Livingstone claims that the current dispute would not have happened if he was still mayor. Crow says it's true that Livingstone did support the RMT's no-compulsory deal, but he thinks the former mayor's memory is rose-tinted. After all, it's not long since the two fell out publicly. "He told people to cross picket lines. Maybe the job had gone to his head, and he thought, I'm mayor and I've got to give my principles up."

How did he feel when Livingstone accused him of running a protection racket in 2007? He looks surprised. "I never heard that. I heard him say we were acting like gangsters." Would he prefer to be protection racketeer or gangster? "That's a good one, innit. Would you rather be hanged or stabbed to death? No, none of them really. What we want to be known as is a trade union that's trying to defend its members. Every time we've taken action we've had a ballot and respected our members wishes."

Crow's politics are fascinating. He is an internationalist who recently stood in the European elections on an anti-EU ticket as part of a trade union coalition. As far as he's concerned, the EU is a capitalist conspiracy to bring wage rates down. Does that mean at heart he is a little Englander? Christ no, he says. He doesn't care where his workers come from so long as they're being paid a fair rate. "People think we're wrapping ourselves up in the union jack, but I have got more in common with a Chinese labourer than I have with Sir Fred Goodwin. I'm anti-EU, but I'm pro-European. Real European support for me means when French dockers take action in Calais, we back it."

Does he agree with the Gordon Brown line, "British Jobs for British workers"? "No. And it didn't work did it? The vote collapsed. Labour's vote collapsed in the election, and it was all built up with scapegoat-ism. British jobs for British workers is just bullshit. Absolute bullshit."

The night Labour won the general election in 1997, he drank a can of beer every time a member of the Tory cabinet lost a seat. How much did he drink that night? "Quite a lot. Nobody cheered more than me that night." What is the Labour legacy 12 years on? "It's left us with the BNP, that's what it's left us with."

But Crow has never been a pessimist. He believes that now is the time for the big battle of ideas, and the left is on the march again. It doesn't feel like that, I protest - bankers are bailed out by the government, while the rest of us suffer. Ach, that's just capital's dance of death, he says. "Joe Slovo, the great South African communist leader, said the Soviet Union may have failed with communism, but capitalism has failed mankind. I think that's what it's all about. People are going to say this system ain't working, it's not providing me with jobs, it's not providing me with homes, it's breaking down socially, it leads to wars."

I ask him why nothing seems to scare him. He reaches into a cupboard and brings out his father's war record. "Three medals he got. He was a PE instructor in the army. He went all over the world. He was unemployed in 1939, God's honest truth, and war broke out and my dad said to my grandad, 'I'm not signing up for the army, Hitler can come over here as far as I'm concerned, I ain't got a job, I ain't got a house, why should I fight for this country, I've got nothing to fight for,' and my granddad, who was a Fusilier, said: 'You're going in the army,' took him down, and signed him up. He didn't want to come out in the end. He loved it.

"The war changed people. My dad told me when they came back from the war they were going to have what they didn't have before. They weren't frightened no more. These people had just fought fascism and beat it. A miner from Wales had just built a national health service! A miner! So I ain't frightened of these people now. Someone puts up a sign at a football match about Bob Crow, they don't frighten me. From a bankrupt country they rebuilt Britain after a war and you're telling me these people now are going to put up with 3.5 million to 4 million people on the dole with no prospects. These kids aren't going to have it."

Crow lives in Essex with his partner Nicola Hoarau who runs the RMT's credit union - there were accusations of cronyims when she was appointed, but Crow says it was all kosher, and she was the only applicant. Between them, they have four children and assorted animals. "The dog is called Castro. The cat is Candy. I couldn't get away with naming it after a political hero, and the fish has got no name. Goldfish, won it at a circus, 17 years of age." A 17-year-old goldfish? "Yeah, I won it by throwing a dart at a board." If you told your members you had a 17-year-old goldfish, they'd never believe another word you said, I say. He laughs. "It's true. Totally true. Unbelievable fish he is. Incredible little fish. Fish with no name."

Does he still think of himself as a communist? "Oh yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Communist stroke socialist, yeah." How would he define that? "I'd say it was based on a society of people's needs. For example, I still can't understand how in a world that produces enough food to feed the world twice over every day, a third of the world is going to bed hungry every night. How can capitalism be working? I can't accept that 50% of the world are working for $2 a day and I can't accept that 10% of workers are working for a dollar a day."

Would it scare his members to know their leader was a communist. "Nah," he says with utter certainty. "If I were a worker and my trade union leader was a communist and he was getting me good pay rises, bring on more communists."

Spot the ball competition

Can you find, in this corner of Crow's office, the following objects: two footballs (one signed by Millwall when they were promoted); a clock from the maritime union in Australia; a fax machine; a photo of his daughter Tanya; a cartoon of Crow as the Voice of Reason, surrounded by busts of Marx, Lenin and Mammon; framed Lenin with a red flag given by the Japan Railway Workers union; 1920 railway branch official sashes made with gold braid; antlers of a Canadian moose shot by a railway worker as a gift for Crow; an iron statue of a locomotive front that used to be on the front gates of Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants - found in skip; a bureau belonging to Havelock Wilson, first general secretary of the National Union of Seamen; flags from the Swedish Railway Workers union and the Norwegian Oil Workers union; a mug from German Railway Workers union, watches from Swiss Railway Workers union and Chinese railway workers with picture of Mao; a brick from the house of Jim Connell composer of The Red Flag; a ticket from a Millwall v Crewe match in which Neil Harris broke Millwall's goal-scoring record, and much, much more?