Different class How leadership hopefuls have been at pains to point out their difficult pasts

EMILY THORNBERRY

Her father was an assistant secretary general of the United Nations, but she was raised by her mother on a council estate in Guildford after he left her for another woman.

The family was so poor, she has said, they had to put their cats down because they would not have survived. One of Ms Thornberry’s first jobs was working on a ferry. She once had to clean out toilets filled with passengers’ vomit. “I just got on with it,” she told The Guardian.

Her husband is a high court judge and she has been eligible to use the title Lady Nugee since his knighthood in 2014.

RICHARD BURGON

He says that while he studied English Literature at Cambridge University, he realised he was different to other members of the Labour Club, who “were not cleverer than the people I went to school with, in an inner-city school in Leeds”.

His parents are both teachers who used to organise rock festivals.

“I grew up hearing about politics and hearing about, for example, the miners’ strike, because my auntie was married to a striking miner,” he told the New Statesman last year. After university, he worked as a lawyer for more than 10 years.

REBECCA LONG-BAILEY

She began her pitch to Labour members in a campaign video last month, which featured her own distinct branding and a detailed back story. She says she was “born to the sound of the roar from the Stretford End” of Old Trafford in Manchester, while her politics were shaped by her father’s redundancy from the Salford shipyard.

“They say your experiences shape who you are and mine certainly have,” she said.

“My dad, Jimmy, worked on the Salford docks and I grew up watching him worrying when round after round of redundancies were inflicted on the docks.”

Ms Long bailey has spoken about time she spent working in a pawn shop, before becoming a solicitor for legal giant Pinsent Masons.

DR ROSENA ALLIN-KHAN

She has made her former role as an NHS doctor one of the defining features of her campaign.

She has not ruled out running to be Labour deputy leader, and says she will consult with her family before declaring.

“I grew up in poverty,” she recently told The Times. “I know what it is like to feel hungry, to feel cold, to feel there is no opportunity for you, to feel lost.”

She says there was a “prolonged period of time where my dad and I didn’t really communicate a great deal”.

Dr Allin-khan still works occasional shifts in A&E to help relieve the health service.

SIR KEIR STARMER

The shadow Brexit secretary set out his stall to working class voters in a radio interview where he claimed his millionaire status and knighthood do not make him out of touch. “My dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker, and my mum was a nurse and she contracted a very rare disease very early in her life that meant she was constantly in need of NHS care, so actually my background isn’t what they think it is,” he said.

“I actually had never been in any workplace other than a factory until I left home for university.

“I had never been in an office. The idea that somehow I personally don’t know what it’s like for people across the country and in all sorts of different circumstances is just not borne out.”

ANGELA RAYNER

She was brought up on a council estate in Stockport by her mother and left school as a pregnant single mother aged 15, with no GCSES above a D.

“My mother didn’t go to mother-and-baby groups or anything like that,” she told The Sunday Times earlier this month.

“I remember going to a clinic and that was because I needed the free nit lotion. That was my only interaction really with the state at that point.” She added: “When I went into school, I’d never actually seen a book. My parents didn’t cuddle us or tell us they loved us. It was automatically assumed that we knew we were loved.”

She has said she felt “written off ” after leaving school. She has not ruled out running on a joint ticket with Ms Long-bailey, with whom she shares a flat.