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My parents were so hard up my mother used a milk bottle as a rolling pin. Does that qualify me to be PM!


First, a disgraceful ­confession: when I was growing up in the 1960s, I was deeply ashamed of my parents' comparative poverty.

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. 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. 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.

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