Corbyn won’t admit he is middle class!
(Even though he was brought up in country manor, has a brother called Piers and earns £130,000 a year)
HE grew up in a seven-bedroom manor house, attended private school and now earns nearly £133,000 a year.
But yesterday Jeremy Corbyn struggled to admit he is middle class.
The hard-Left Labour leader was questioned about his background as he appeared on ITV’s Peston on Sunday who said some of Mr Corbyn’s critics say he doesn’t understand the middle classes.
Presenter Robert Peston said that ‘by chance’ he had seen the ‘rather lovely’ house Mr Corbyn grew up in.
He commented that the property – Yew Tree Manor in Shropshire – was a ‘pretty nice place to grow up in’.
Mr Corbyn, 66, attempted to play down his affluent roots. He said that whoever owns the home now ‘has spent a lot more money on it than my mum and dad were ever able to’.
Mr Peston pushed the point, saying: ‘A very simple question: Do you think of
‘A pretty nice place to grow up in’
yourself as middle class?’ Squirming, Mr Corbyn replied: ‘Oh gawd, I don’t know.’
He eventually accepted that because of his income and the house he owns he was middle class, like all MPs.
But he insisted that he saw himself as someone who ‘represents a community of the poor and the better off’.
Mr Corbyn said: ‘Listen, I live in my own house, well it’s a shared ownership with a bank actually, it’s called a mortgage these days. I live in a house, I’m an owneroccupier in my constituency. That puts me in a minority.
‘Yes, every MP has a lifestyle which is, I suppose, more or less middle class, but I see myself as somebody that represents and is proud to represent a community of the poor and the better-off but above all it’s a community that wants to come together to ensure that everybody, everybody can achieve their maximum in life and in society. That is what a better Britain would look like.’
Yew Tree Manor, where Mr Corbyn grew up, is a seven-bedroom property with two acres of land in the countryside, near Newport.
Once part of the Duke of Sutherland’s Lilleshall estate, the house had outbuildings and a paddock and is now worth around £1.2million.
Before his family moved to Shropshire, young Jeremy spent his first five years in a five-bedroom detached house in the village of Kington St Michael in Wiltshire. That property was recently put on the market for £610,000.
Mr Corbyn’s father, David, was an electrical engineer and his mother Norma a scientist and teacher. Their sons had very middle class names – Jeremy and his three older brothers Edward, Andrew and Piers. Both his parents were committed socialists but they nonetheless enrolled him in the private Castle House School, in Newport, where fees today are more than £7,000 a year, and then sent him to Adams’ Grammar School, also in Newport.
Mr Corbyn owns a £650,000 home in Islington, North London. A recent study of his pension and earnings suggested he has banked more than £3million in taxpayer-funded pay and pensions over the past 30 years.
Official records suggest he has been paid some £1.5million since he was elected as an MP in 1983. His MPs’ pension pot is estimated to be worth a staggering £1.6million.
When the Islington North MP leaves Parliament, that is expected to leave him with a pension topping £50,000 a year.
Mr Corbyn’s salary as an MP is £74,962 and he earns an additional £58,000 as leader of the Opposition.