TIM STANLEY

Telegraph Leader Writer

When I was 14, my father was unemployed, so I guess we were part of the nonworking class.

He left school without qualifications and became an engineer, one of the Stakhanovite shock troops of BT (in work at 10am, home by 4pm). After privatisation, he got a company car, which was a mixed blessing. The vehicle had Cable and Wireless blazoned across both sides, making us look like a mobile billboard.

Mum came from a family of bohemians who had refused to work on principle (she also left school early, to tour the Caribbean and Australia). She married my father, I think, because he looked exotically ordinary. They scrimped and saved until they could afford a nice house in West Kent, and I was the great hope for class mobility.

Dad got the boot shortly after I joined the local grammar, and mum took several jobs to keep the mortgage going. My weekends were spent delivering leaflets and newspapers.

My father had what I guess would be diagnosed nowadays as a nervous breakdown. He got another job within a couple of years but never recovered his self-confidence. Poverty is humiliating. The school organised a two-day activity celebrating the EU (this was John Major’s Britain). They demanded we all contribute ten quid and I didn’t want to ask my parents for it. So, when a teacher demanded payment, I told her I thought the EU was rubbish and I was withholding our money in protest. From little acorns, Brexit grew.

We were not workingclass, we were lowermiddle-class, which the BBC wouldn’t begin to understand: people who are doing OK but are within one sacking or sickness of losing it all.