You don’t have to be chav to lead the Labour Party, but it helps!
Rather than a grand battle of big ideas or a serious debate about why this government has blundered so much, Labour’s looming leadership contest looks set to be a depressing competition to see who had the grimmest childhood, laments James Ford
Did your dad have a blue-collar job? Did you live in social housing? Did your mum claim benefits? Congratulations! If you have answered yes to any of the above, you have pre-qualified to run for the Labour leadership. No, you don’t need a coherent position on Brexit, on migration or the cost of living. It doesn’t even matter if your imminent premiership spooks the markets. A truly gritty upbringing is all you need to woo Labour members.
That seems to be the message from the opening phase of the contest to replace Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. Scions of the petty bourgeoisie need not apply. This is a contest of proletarian backstories, not big ideas.
Take, for example, the cherubic Wes Streeting. This weekend, The Times kindly re-ran details of the former Health Secretary’s upbringing that were first aired in his memoirs. There was the rather predictable tick list of Ken Loach-style milestones of underprivilege: single parent household, a council flat in the East End, free school meals and school bullies. But this is juxtaposed with the sort of details that belong in a Guy Ritchie film: Streeting’s grandad knew the Krays, his nan gave birth in handcuffs and shared a cell in Holloway with Christine Keeler. Streeting would, bizarrely, describe this as a “proper Labour story” in a Guardian interview.
And Streeting is not the only one playing this game. No profile of Angela Rayner has ever skipped over her troubled childhood on a council estate, her teen pregnancy or her mother’s struggles with her mental health. And ‘King of the North’ Andy Burnham has long complained about how hard his life was growing up with his own great disadvantage: being northern. It is like a modern version of Monty Python’s famous “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch from the 1960s. Only the carefully curated tale of overstated misery is cynical rather than comic.
Chav-off
Perhaps we should blame Keir Starmer for this “chav-off”, where leadership hopefuls must compete in a strange prolier-than-thou bidding war. He is the one who never stops banging on about his dad, the toolmaker. No wonder Ed Miliband has been hesitant to enter the fray. Being the son of a Marxist intellectual, raised in a big house in Primrose Hill (don’t ask about the inheritance tax!) and spending your teenage years interning for Sir Anthony Wedgwood Benn is not the kind of biography that really cuts the mustard anymore.
I’m not suggesting that a contest where only Harrovians and Etonians duke it out over who had won the most Latin prizes would be better. Far from it. That sort of production line produced plenty of dud Prime Ministers for the Liberals and the Conservatives. But there is something deeply dispiriting about the kind of performative poverty porn that seems to be expected to climb the greasy pole within the Labour party today. When authenticity is craved by voters, Cambridge graduates (like both Burnham and Streeting) cosplaying as Oliver Twist or Jude the Obscure seems like a slap in the face to the electorate.
None of us get to choose our parents. No one should ever have to apologise for the childhood they gifted us. And a deprived upbringing must never be reason enough to exclude anyone from frontline politics. But nor should we make the mistake that a tough childhood is actually an essential or desirable qualification for high office. Does receiving free school meals make a politician better suited to deal with a crisis in the Straits of Hormuz? Can you only negotiate with the EU if you grew up in a council flat? If British political history over the past two centuries has taught us anything it is that Prime Ministers with humble origins are just as likely as the overprivileged ones to disappoint us.
James Ford was an advisor to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson
