Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s shadow education secretary, grew up in the kind of place where Liz Truss used to pretend she’d grown up: a terrace in Tyne and Wear with a disused railway line at one end and a flattened wasteland at the other, where a chemical plant used to be. “There was an air of decline about the place,” she says. “Youth unemployment was very high; as time went on the houses were increasingly in poor condition. Rotten windows, no heating upstairs. Yet at the same time, I was by no means the worst off.”
If she were a new-breed Tory, she would be tooting her own horn about her proximity to the beating heart of the British voter. But instead she is new-breed Labour: self-effacing, sometimes frustratingly so, practical, the kind of person who loses the credit when surrounded by people who constantly grab at it. Last week was a case in point: Phillipson has put childcare at the centre of Labour’s thinking, and made the education beat into something bigger than GCSE results and class sizes, able to carry the party’s values. Then Jeremy Hunt waltzed in with his budget and pinched the issue, or thought he did. More on that later.
