“I’m not working class any more,” Keir Starmer told LBC’s Nick Ferrari this week. Of course that’s the case. As the Daily Mail rushed to point out, he has just paid off his mortgage on a £2m house, and earned a lot as a barrister and as the director of public prosecutions. The right loves to probe the hypocrisies and the “champagne socialism” of Labour people. The Bollinger Bullingdon Club members, meanwhile, are just fine as they don’t pretend to do good.
Tool-maker father, nurse mother, a childhood in which at times they struggled to pay bills – this we know about Starmer. Politicians do need to talk about their origins because it tells us where they’re coming from, in every sense. Why else were those infamous Bullingdon photos suppressed that displayed those young masters of the universe David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, among other luminaries, at their arrogant worst? Class origins matter.
This cabinet is the most working-class in history, with some from backgrounds of grinding hardship. Wes Streeting’s remarkable autobiography tells of a family where neglect and crime were commonplace. He came up via good teachers pushing him to go to a summer school at Cambridge and there was no looking back from there. Angela Rayner’s story is harsher: a single mother at 16 in Stockport, no qualifications, she worked as a carer before rising up through the trade union movement. Bridget Phillipson’s single mother was poor in Sunderland. David Lammy and Steve........