The full story of poor, ‘fatherless’ Emily

I HAVE long wanted to settle an old score with Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry but didn’t bother because she seemed to be such a minor figure.

Some years ago, on BBC’s Question Time, she exploded into a purple mist of phoney outrage, claiming falsely that I had stigmatised her as coming from a ‘problem family’.

She announced loudly on TV that she had been raised in a fatherless family on a council estate by a mother on benefits. She implied that her mother had been single. To wild applause, she demanded of me: ‘How dare you say that single parents living in council estates are by definition problem families?’

I’d said no such thing. But I left it at that. But now Ms Thornberry, right, is beginning to loom and swell a bit on the political stage. She could shortly be a Cabinet Minister if the Tories continue to destroy themselves. So we need to know a bit more about her. She thinks so, too, and last week she elaborated on her misery memoir in a Left-wing newspaper.

She didn’t quite say she had to hop to school because she only had one clog. But she did say the Thornberrys were so broke that they had to put down their cats. This is undoubtedly very sad, especially for the cats.

But then, at last, she slipped out the truth about her so-called ‘fatherless family’. It was anything but fatherless. Ms Thornberry’s mother was anything but single.

Little Emily’s tragedy was not the fault of the wicked Tories or of cruel capitalists. It was the work of a bloviating, highprincipled human rights obsessive, pro-immigration lobbyist and equality fanatic, Ms Thornberry’s parent, Cedric.

In 1966, two years before deserting his wife and three small children, Cedric Thornberry tried (and failed) to become Labour MP for Guildford. In his campaign leaflet, he posed in front of a marble fireplace, boasting of his family, his Cambridge degree, his legal career and his work for the Foreign Office. But within a few short months, Cedric Thornberry had betrayed his wife and young children, and fathered a child by another woman. He left them penniless and skedaddled abroad to avoid being forced to take responsibility. He ended up in a top job at the UN. In his long absence doing more important things, the council rehoused his family, and Ms Thornberry’s mother Sallie became a much-loved mayor of Guildford. Whatever misfortunes befell young Emily were entirely her father’s doing.

My point is this. Ms Thornberry misleadingly used her misfortune to make cheap propaganda, and she should stop doing that.

And her father brilliantly typifies a certain type of socialist, who thinks he is virtuous because he says all the right things, and who is terribly concerned about the rights of immigrants, but who dumps his own wife and children on the state’s doorstep because he thinks he is too wonderful to bother with the simple task of keeping his promises.

We can all learn from that, whatever our politics are.