The last Blairite

Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his early years ‘sleeping in a drawer’, he says, in a one-bedroom house containing four generations of his family.

But there’s no self-pity or faux-nostalgia in his reminiscing. What defines Murphy and his politics is not his family’s poverty, but their determination. When his father lost his job, he simply got on a bus and travelled around the UK until he found another one. ‘We ended up in the city the furthest away from Glasgow — Plymouth,’ says Murphy, ‘because that’s where my father found work. We lived in a caravan in Plymouth.’

It is perhaps this background that allows Murphy to talk more frankly about Britain’s deep social problems than most politicians in his position or party.