‘We’ can’t know how the very poorest live

I’ve been conducting a straw poll. Using incidental encounters with people who don’t follow politics closely, I’m learning what ordinary voters do or don’t know or think of Rishi Sunak. Responses range between neutral and mildly positive. Beyond that, what do I get from respondents? (1) They really don’t know much about him; but (2) they do know he’s rich.

The problem for Mr Sunak is not so much that he’s known to be rich – of course he is – but that this is almost the only thing about him that has sunk in. Here in Britain the observation that a politician is rich is typically followed by the thought that this may ‘separate’ them from the lives and concerns of the ordinary voter. ‘If you haven’t lived it,’ we say, ‘how can you fully understand it?’

Well, let me relate two stories drawn from my own experience. In 1985, as a Tory MP, I tried living for a week on a single man’s benefits in Scotswood, Newcastle, a neighbourhood absolutely devastated by unemployment. For the cameras I mouthed the usual stuff about knowing now how it felt; but the truth (to which my producers would not have been hospitable) was that I hadn’t experienced ‘what it was like’ at all. I had hope. I always knew it would end and I would be returning to the comforts of an adequately remunerated career. Those I lived among in Scotswood didn’t. So it was by definition impossible for someone in my position to feel with as opposed to feeling for. Sympathy, yes; compassion, yes; ‘empathy’, no.

I draw from this the conclusion that neither politicians nor journalists nor most Spectator readers can ever really ‘put themselves in the place’ of the poor or desperate, though we may learn about their circumstances. Some few at Westminster did start from a wretched background and may remember, but these are not memories we can expect most leaders to have or whose lack they can remedy. We should stop pretending otherwise.

The second story comes from only last week. I was in the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, having driven there to have a tow-bar fitted to our car. I must not paint a bleak picture of Chesterfield, a once hard bitten town that is not doing at all badly these days. ‘Ches-vegas’, as local wags dub the place, is lively, in places leafy, and it can hold its head high. But it is not without its grim estates, and you will find real poverty there if you look.

I had hardly looked, and what I’d seen I’d seen from the altitude of the driver’s seat of a 4x4. Now I had no wheels, it was cold and raining, and to my dismay I’d learnt that the fitting would take five hours. All I could do was walk. So I walked, at first aimlessly. Passing cars splashed me, and navigating a series of vast roundabouts took an age of waiting at pedestrian lights – but I had nothing else to do. And it being a Monday morning, I found myself among (and for the first time at the level of) people who didn’t have full-time jobs, nor access to a car. There was a man on a mobility scooter; a few mums, one of them horrifyingly overweight; a drunk or two; some youths I would normally have described as ‘feckless’; and some pensioners taking dogs for a walk in a sodden park.

I tried a McDonald’s for coffee (my first time) and realised how pleasant, comfortable and welcoming, as well as good value, this chain is for those who walk in off the street. Later I saw the old fellow on a mobility scooter, who looked ill, light up a fag – and instead of disapproving saw what a pleasure that first drag must be. The fat mother in McDonald’s was enjoying a massive pastry thing and for the first time I didn’t begrudge anyone the experience. Finally, cold drove me to the bus station (how important for the carless a good, clean public lavatory is) and using my free bus pass I spent an hour going to Matlock and back on the express bus, just to keep warm. As I looked around at other passengers, the importance of good buses loomed larger in my mind than it ever has before.

You will find it easy to laugh at this naive account of an upper-middle-class gent having his eyes opened to ‘how the other half live’ but my point is this. These people were not the other half. They were not even a quarter, no more (I reckon) than a tenth – probably less. They are hardly a significant proportion of the electorate. And their lives are further from the lives of the working and lower-middle classes in Chesterfield’s terraces and estates than the lives of these latter are from Rishi’s life.

Most people have access to cars. The Sunaks could afford a Rolls but a second-hand Vauxhall Cavalier will get you there as surely as a Bentley. The Sunaks could afford £20,000 wristwatches, high-end trainers and luxury holidays, but most of Britain can afford a package holiday, a watch that tells the same time as Rishi’s and decent shoes. As you go up the income scale you become subject in your expenditure to the law of diminishing returns, finally buying super-expensive versions of goods and services available in far cheaper versions that do more or less the same job.

The really big leap, therefore, is from the bottom to the middle, not the middle to the top. Keir Starmer’s life is more like Rishi Sunak’s than it is like the lives of the unemployed I met in Scotswood, or the depressed people I saw on the street in Chesterfield.

So let us have an end to median-income voters, upper-middle-class Guardian readers or £80,000-a-year politicians sneering that Sunak cannot completely understand the condition of the poor. He can’t, and no more can they. It isn’t about sharing people’s pain: it’s about alleviating it. We should judge our leaders on that.