From goth to Chancellor

If only I’d known. If only I’d foreseen that the teenage classmate who strode through our school gates every morning, rolled-up Daily Telegraph tucked incongruously (and insouciantly) under one arm, dark leather trench-coat flapping rhythmically in sympathy with the long, swaying black crows-wings of shoulder-length hair, square-heeled boots clicking and clacking their way into morning assembly… if I’d somehow intuited, as I say, that this lanky 15-year-old with the questing, beaky nose and rimless glasses, this proto-goth, would one day be Chancellor of the Exchequer…

Well, actually, I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised. I don’t think any of us who knew Philip Hammond back in 1971 at Shenfield School in Essex would’ve been. Political destiny was written all over the guy.

Since Phil emerged as a major player in the high-rolling, high-risk casino world of Westminster politics, I’ve been approached by countless media outlets all wanting to know the same thing.

‘What was he like? Just how right-wing was he back then? Was he Tory Boy? Did you all hate him?’

I know what they want. Many of them are hoping for a clichéd, pastiche-of-a–profile of your typical post-war Tory Boy; the neo-righty that everyone loathed by default.

But Phil wasn’t like that, and more to the point we didn’t see him like that. The general political mood in the early 1970s was nowhere near as polarised as it is today. These were pre-Thatcher times. The word ‘Tory’ did not, back then, invite the almost inevitable suffix ‘scum’.

Of course, most of Phil’s fellow fifth-formers were on the left. We were adolescents, children of the 1960s, pretend revolutionaries. We wore Che Guevara T-shirts and inserted the word ‘proletariat’ into as many sentences as we could manage.

So for Phil Hammond to stroll to school each day carrying the Telegraph — which he would calmly read in assembly and during the lunch break — was so uncool that it was, well… cool.