The middle-class drop-out who rose without a trace of private industry

JEREMY CORBYN is not one of the wealth creators. He has spent his life cushioned first by his solidly middleclass family, and then by his adopted brothers and sisters in the international socialist movement. Having performed poorly at school, he dropped out of university. From his early 20s, his wage slips have been untainted by the stain of private industry. He has never started or run a business.

His famous diffidence to career ambition is the product of an upbringing which meant he could afford to fail. Corbyn shares with David Cameron the security and ease that comes from having a comfortably-off family who took pride in helping the next generation.

His grandfathers, a solicitor and surveyor, both left behind amounts equivalent to six-figure sums in today’s money. His mother Naomi was a grammar school teacher, his father David a brilliant electrical engineer.

While the Corbyns valued education – paying for their four sons to attend private prep schools before they passed the 11-plus which gained them admittance to grammar school – the young Jeremy seems to have been averse to hitting the books.

After leaving school at 18 with two E grades in his A-levels, he went on Voluntary Service Overseas, working as a school teacher in newly independent Jamaica.

On returning to Britain, he moved back into his parents’ seven-bedroom manor house in Shropshire, where he took on a variety of temporary jobs.

When his mother found a university course that would take him, at the then North London Polytechnic, he jumped at the chance, but lasted only a couple of terms before dropping out.

Instead, he went to work at the nowdefunct National Union of Tailors and Garment Works and then the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE – now part of Unison), at the time one of the largest unions in the country.

There he met some of the people who would ease his passage to the next stage of his life, the likes of the late Bernie Grant and Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott (who did not work at the union but moved in the same circles). When, following a split in the Labour Party which saw the MP for Islington North defect to the SDP, an opening arose in the safe London seat, Corbyn’s friends pestered him to put his name forward.

A few years after his election to Parliament, his parents passed away, leaving their thatched cottage in Wiltshire, worth well over half a million pounds, to be divided between their four sons.

As good socialists, they would no doubt have agreed fully with the principle that inheritance tax be paid.

But as loving parents prepared to do what it took to give their children the best in life, they would perhaps also have concurred with Mr Cameron’s sentiment that: “Aspiration and wealth-creation are not somehow dirty words.”