In her first audition for the job of Labour deputy leader, Bridget Phillipson came to Brighton to woo the trade unions. And she began with a traumatic story about her childhood.
By the time she rose to address the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference at 3.30pm, she was one of no fewer than six candidates, all women, having announced her bid as “a proud working-class woman from the North East from a single-parent family”.
And as is the habit of candidates for election to high office these days – Sir Keir Starmer first told the story about his father Rodney the toolmaker in a speech at a TUC conference – she told delegates about an ordeal during her childhood.
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“I grew up on a street of council houses in Washington, in the North East – just me and my mam,” she said. Note she said “mam”, not “mother”.
“And back when I was young,” she continued, “a man turned up at the front door with a baseball bat.
“A few weeks earlier, we’d been burgled – and my mam had reported it to the police. Now the man had come back to scare her into silence.
“He clearly didn’t know my mam though. Because even at nine years old I could have told him he was wasting his time.
“She stood her ground. He went to prison.”
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And the lesson she learned? “From my mam I learned about strength,” she said. “Not the kind that preys on the weak.
“No, I learned the kind that stands up to adversity. The strength to do what’s right, even if it would be easier to crumble.
“That street of ours had challenges, yes, of course. But there was kindness. There was compassion. So much of it.
“There was our neighbour who knew that we were struggling one winter, posted an envelope through the letterbox, marked ‘for Bridget’s coat’.
“And I never forget that kindness.
“There were my grandparents, too, who moved here from Ireland. A happy presence in my childhood.
“It’s from my grandad that I get my love of reading and learning. From the days when he would bounce me on his knee – book in hand.”
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She could have gone on to say that that love of reading took her from her Catholic high school to Oxford University, where she graduated in history and modern languages.
Her grandfather, she said, fought on the front line in the Second World War, then was in the vanguard of new nurses helping to build the new National Health Service, under the Attlee government.
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“And so, congress, when people ask me where my values come from, I point to my mam, to my grandparents, to my neighbours, to my community,” she said.
Lots of politicians claim working class origins, poverty and hardship. And no doubt some of them embellish their humble back story for political advantage.
But Bridget Phillipson is the genuine working class article. And her story – like Sir Keir’s Rodney the toolmaker – is one we’ll no doubt hear a lot more during this deputy leader election campaign.
