First, a disgraceful confession: when I was growing up in the 1960s, I was deeply ashamed of my parents’ comparative poverty.
The trouble was that they’d sacrificed almost every material comfort to send me to very expensive schools, where I was surrounded by boys from much richer families. Children can be such ungrateful swine.
For some lessons at Westminster School, I used to sit between the offspring of multi-millionaires — on my right, a Sieff of the Marks & Spencer dynasty, and on my left a Zilkha, whose father was the founder of Mothercare. Oh, and his mother was a Lebanese banking heiress, and his step-father a millionaire Labour MP.
If I remember rightly, Zilkha lived in a palace in Eaton Square, which was and is about the smartest address in London. I shudder now to admit I would rather have died than invite him home to the cramped mansion-block flat where the six of us Utleys lived in Paddington, with its uncarpeted floors and threadbare furniture, stinking of my mother’s cats and the paraffin heater which for years was our only source of heating.
The comic spectacle of Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Monty Python sketch, Four Yorkshiremen
To this day, I recall one rare occasion when I did invite one of my poorer classmates home. We found my mother in the kitchen, rolling pastry with an empty milk bottle (isn’t it funny how the stupidest little things stick in the mind?’).
Acutely embarrassed, I made the following, excruciating speech to my schoolmate: ‘You see, glass is much the best material for rolling pastry. It isn’t that we can’t afford a rolling pin.’
At this, my mother piped up: ‘Yes, it jolly well is!’ I was mortified, and blushed a deep purple.
Little did I realise that a day would come when a deprived childhood would become an essential qualification for the job of Prime Minister.
So it seems, anyway, from the comic spectacle of the leaders of our two biggest parties, both multi-millionaires, vying with each other to convince voters that they had it tough when they were growing up.
It reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Monty Python sketch, Four Yorkshiremen.
Older readers will know the one I mean. It’s the sketch in which the Pythons, over a ‘passable bit of risotto’ and a ‘good glass of Chateau de Chasselas’, compete with each other to paint the grimmest picture of their childhoods.
It ends with the fourth Yorkshireman, played by Eric Idle, claiming: ‘Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work 29 hours a day down t’mill, and pay millowner for permission to come to work. And when we got home, our dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.’
The first Yorkshireman (Michael Palin) then chips in: ‘And you try and tell the young people of today that. They don’t believe you.’
All right, Starmer and Sunak haven’t taken things quite that far. But think how Sir Keir can’t open his mouth these days without informing us: ‘My father was a toolmaker.’ Leave aside the fact that this invites the obvious heckle: ‘Of course he was! He made you!’
Let’s not quibble, either, about the fact that toolmakers are not necessarily poor. Think of the billionaire Lord Bamford, chairman of JCB.
Clearly Sir Keir — an old boy of a grammar school that went private while he was there, a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, Privy Councillor, King’s Counsellor and former Director of Public Prosecutions — believes that his father’s occupation, and his family’s inability to pay the telephone bill on time, establishes him as bona fide member of the working class.
He’d like us to think it makes him a regular bloke with a deep understanding of real life, as it is lived by the down-trodden masses. All I can say is that, personally, I’d have more faith in his grasp of reality if he didn’t have such difficulty in telling the difference between men and women.
It would help, too, if he didn’t believe the way to promote growth is to give more power to militant trades unionists, clobber the enterprising with punitive taxes and shut down the cheapest sources of energy available to industry.
Nor do I think he’s showing much realism when he suggests that the best way to improve education is to threaten the survival of some of the country’s better schools by charging them VAT, while flooding the state system with private-school pupils whose parents will no longer be able to afford the fees. But what do I know?
In the competitive-poverty stakes, however, poor Mr Sunak finds himself at something of a disadvantage. As the unmistakably middle-class son of a GP and a pharmacist — and an old boy of Winchester (which is almost as good a school as Westminster) — he can hardly claim to have suffered great hardship in his childhood.
But not to be outdone by Sir Keir, this hasn’t stopped him from trying. In an interview with ITV this week, he was at pains to insist that he, too, had to ‘go without’ when he was growing up.
It was only when he was challenged to say what, precisely, he had to go without, that he came a bit unstuck. On the spur of the moment, the best he could come up with was: ‘Famously, Sky TV. That was something we never had growing up, actually.’
Cue mocking laughter from those who rightly point out that going without Sky is hardly the most heart-wrenching symptom of poverty. (In fairness, I should add that having been a poorish boy myself at an expensive school, I understand how frustrating it is to miss out on what our schoolfellows have).
Mr Sunak’s remark wasn’t quite as absurd, however, as Sir Keir’s reaction to it. Launching his party’s manifesto yesterday, he told us that his family, too, ‘certainly’ didn’t have Sky TV when he was a child.
For once, I fully believe him — if only because when Sky TV was launched in 1989, Sir Keir was already 27 years old!
By the same token, everyone of my age (I’m 70), no matter how rich or poor, can truthfully claim that in our own childhoods we had to go without mobile telephones, video games, satnav, laptops, Amazon, Apple, BBC iPlayer and Taylor Swift records.
Ah, well, since claiming victimhood seems to have become a must for politicians these days, I guess that if I had ambitions of leading the nation (no danger of that, I promise), I’d play the childhood poverty card for all I was fit.
I’d never stop boasting that my blind father was permanently broke, our car was forever running out of petrol because my mother could never afford to fill it up and my feet are deformed because the money wouldn’t run to new shoes.
Just don’t ask me why any of this should be thought a qualification for high office. Indeed, all I ask is a Prime Minister who is up to the job.
Meanwhile, I’ll let you into a secret: despite my occasional embarrassment among my mega-rich schoolmates, I had a blissfully happy childhood, blessed as my siblings and I were with parents who loved us, wanted the best for us, and stuck together through thick and thin.
In that respect, I see now, I was a great deal better off than many a young inhabitant of Eaton Square.
