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. He readily admits that the sense of get up and go that his family displayed has ‘undoubtedly diminished’ among their modern equivalents. He fears that ‘the inherited family poverty of attitude is now cascading into a third generation’ and rails against what he dismissively labels as the ‘chat that says “I’m as well off on benefits, I don’t need to get out of bed, and the world owes me a living”.’ It is the kind of robust analysis that makes many on the Labour right wonder if Murphy is their last best hope.

But the ‘Glasgow to Plymouth’ chapter is not the full story of Murphy’s childhood. In 1980, when he was aged 12, his family emigrated to South Africa. His politics have, he claims, been forged by ‘growing up poor in Glasgow and growing up white in South Africa’.