It was the foundation of everything I was to learn later.
But, in a way, the knowledge he gave me and that I imbibed from book after book was secondary. I think that from quite a young age I was aware of how important politics was, not because I read about it in some theoretical or abstract way but because I could see, even as a child, the import and impact of political change around me. Not just with my dad’s work, in Longbridge as I’ve described, but on each and every aspect of my little life.
When I was small we lived in a pretty dilapidated council house. The worst part was that it had no heating upstairs. I remember as a little four- or five-year-old begging Mum to let me sleep with her when my dad was on his night shifts because it was just so cold upstairs. Mum didn’t mind,† but in the end she bought me an electric blanket and we left it on all night. God only knows how we didn’t set the house ablaze. Especially when you consider she occasionally gave me a hot-water bottle to go with it. Even with both, I rarely wanted to get up in the mornings – just now and again, in winter, you could see your breath inside.
I didn’t know any different: it was home, I was happy. I had two kind, loving parents, a mum and dad who although so young did everything they could to give me the best beginning that they could. But, looking back, the fact that a little boy and then a baby sister were allowed to live in a state-owned house without proper heating in the early to mid-1990s was appalling.
At some point, near the dawn of the new millennium, those houses on Willets Road in Northfield were declared unfit for habitation. They were rightly pulled down and we moved to a better house on a rougher estate but which nonetheless my mum and dad eventually bought under the right to buy scheme. One day, not long after we moved there, on my way home from school, I was beaten up by some older kids. They kept accusing me of ‘cussing’ their mum. I replied meekly, tearily, that I’d never even met their mum. It didn’t stop the next round of punches; I learned then that there’s nothing quite like the sound of the impact of fist on jawbone. Mind you, I was so fat at the time they probably rightly intuited that if they’d gone for anything else their hands might have disappeared under endless rolls of flesh. I was so ashamed that I didn’t admit it for days. When the indigo bruises began to appear, I told Mum I’d walked into a door at school. When she asked why they appeared to be on every side of my face I replied that it was, in fact, a revolving door. Unsurprisingly she wasn’t fooled. For a while I didn’t walk home from school any more. Mum worried we’d moved into the worst neighbourhood in south Birmingham; my dad, by comparison, who had been brought up in proper poverty as the youngest of a big Irish family in Middlesbrough, seemed to think it was, if anything, moderately swish. The trouble peaked one night when the garages around the back of our house were set on fire. I watched it from my bedroom, wondering to myself why anyone would want to do it. The truth is, though they might not have had much more than me materially, they lacked my real blessing: two loving parents, who both wanted me to achieve. In the end, the council put in a new neighbourhood team to sort out the estate. Over time, things got better. After a few years, the problems more or less disappeared.
I attended a lovely school, Turves Green Primary, just down the road. A year or two before I left, me and a few of my friends who were quite bright got an extra teacher, Mrs Clinton, who worked just with us on advanced English and maths lessons. It really helped bring us along and stretched us in ways we might not otherwise have been. Embarrassingly, I remember being thrilled she shared her surname with the then president and asked if there was any chance she might be related and could arrange a tour of the White House. I was more than a bit disappointed by the reply. Around the same time, we started doing something called ‘Literacy and Numeracy hour’. I remember my teacher Mrs Hicking, doubtless aware of this little weird boy already showing an odd, precocious interest in politics, telling me it was a new idea from the new government. I was puzzled but intrigued that teachers, the summit of all power, were being instructed from elsewhere. It was the first of many changes over the next few years.
Then the school was refurbished. I was disappointed to be leaving just as everything was unveiled. I didn’t get into King Edward’s Grammar School a few miles away and so accompanied my (male) friends and travelled a few hundred yards up the road to the local comprehensive, Turves Green Boys’ Technology College. It was a school that had its problems and that did its best with lots of kids who didn’t have that much in life. Many of the boys there didn’t think learning would help them and didn’t see much point in the subjects or knowledge the teachers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, tried to impart. In my early days, you didn’t get the sense some of the teachers were doing much to help matters. I remember one maths lesson, the teacher, who usually taught PE, gave up trying to keep control of an especially riotous afternoon session. He called for the deputy head, the austere, taciturn Mr Williams. He remonstrated with us: ‘You’re some of our brightest lads, if you actually apply yourselves, you can get Ds and Cs … maybe more, if you’re lucky.’ Educational rallying call, it was not. The lack of ambition, on both sides of the teacher’s desk, was occasionally profound.
Over time, things improved and as they did a fair number of opportunities came my way. A ‘Gifted and Talented’ fund was established and (thanks to some very dedicated teachers) paid for me to learn GCSE Drama and GCSE Spanish after school. It also paid for a hotel in London for me to do a week’s work experience in Parliament, chaperoned by (you guessed it) Grandad. You can imagine my 14-year-old giddiness (‘Was that David Blunkett?! MY GOD, THAT’S DAVID BLUNKETT, GRANDAD!’). It was also the first time I’d properly visited London. I walked poor Grandad’s legs off. He spent the afternoons recovering before we set out on our travels again: Piccadilly Circus, the Embankment, Whitehall, Oxford Street, Leicester Square – places I’d hitherto known only on a Monopoly board. As I walked around Parliament and in London’s bright lights, I swore to myself that one day I’d come back to work in both. Sometimes, as I’m walking past Big Ben on my way to work, or dashing to meet an MP or going to do a live in Downing Street, I think back and can almost see my podgy 14-year-old ghost walking with his grandad, and I pinch myself.
Towards the end of my time at school, a senior teacher handed me a brochure with the words ‘Aim Higher’ emblazoned across its front. Inside, its pages outlined a new programme, a series of summer schools that had just been established across British universities to encourage kids from state schools without much history of sending students to Russell Group universities to apply. Everything was paid for, accommodation, train fare, food – the works. ‘You should think about the one at Oxford,’ he told me. I acted on his advice, applied to the programme and was accepted. I had the time of my life. Up to then I used to dream of what it would be like to escape my happy but small world and in that week, surrounded by the books and the buildings and the spires, I began, for the first time, to see the shape of a new, bigger existence that might take its place. From then on all I wanted to do was go and I was determined to do everything I could to make it happen. I spent weekends scouring the internet (dial-up, when not interrupted by calls from Nan, aunts and Mum’s friends) for every scrap of information I could to help me get there, be it about interviews, extracurricular activities, practice entrance examination techniques and the rest. I worked like a dog for my GCSEs, now knowing how important they were to the application process. All of it flowed from that week. Two years later, in what was then the proudest moment of my life, I was able to tell my crying, jubilant mum that I’d won a place at St John’s College, Oxford, to read History and Politics. I will never forget opening that letter, in full Charlie Bucket mode, reading the words aloud again and again lest they vanish from the page. Mum literally jumped for joy; once she came back down to earth, I noticed she had a look in her eyes. At the time I thought it was pride. But looking back I think it was more: it was vindication. Vindication in the face of all the people who had written her off as a hopeless teenage mum all those years before. I think much of the rest of my life has flowed from the contents of that letter, opened on that December afternoon. And yet I’m quite confident that the words inside would neither have been read nor written had it not been for that precious week in midsummer, two years before.
Just as I was packing my bags for Oxford, work was about to start on a new £3m sports hall at Turves Green Boys. Birmingham was changing around me too. Slowly but surely, with the new Bull