First of all, some poverty top trumps: I’m one of five kids. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a labourer but only when he was well enough to labour. For much of my childhood, he wasn’t, so we had to subsist on state benefits, free school meals and clothes that arrived in bin bags from the local church. My childhood was scarred by poverty and petty crime. However, before you reach for the violin, it was a childhood leavened by love and laughter which I wouldn’t have swapped for the world. Not least because, all these years later, it’s given me a natural understanding of Angela Rayner and why working-class voters are the ones who really cannot abide her.

Since it has come out that Rayner avoided paying an estimated £40,000 in stamp duty (which she blames on mistaken legal advice) the mid

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