Oops! Rishi is not the first leader to trip up talking about how tough it was growing up

The prime minister has been widely mocked for recalling how his parents made him ‘go without’ satellite TV as a sacrifice in childhood. But, says Sean O’Grady, too many politicians feel the pressure to open up about their past

Rishi Sunak on a visit to a nursery in Hartlepool (Pool/AFP via Getty)

Despite his best efforts to make himself sound like the product of “an NHS family”, so devoted to helping the impoverished community around them that they couldn’t even afford Sky television, Rishi Sunak’s attempts to mould his past to suit the peculiar prejudices of the British electorate are not proving that successful.

There’s no doubt, surely, that his parents, East African Asians who migrated to the UK in the 1960s, worked hard and did their best for their family. His dad was a GP in the NHS (self-employed, as are they all), and mum was a pharmacist who ended up with a sizeable business. They were enterprising and prosperous enough to pay the considerable fees to send Rishi to a top public school (Winchester), which gave him an excellent start in life.

There’s also no doubt that he suffered from racism, which is an extremely painful thing. But sometimes he downplays his relatively privileged background in an almost comical fashion. The anecdote about doing without a Sky satellite dish in his ill-fated ITV interview is one such example.

I’ve no idea what decisions were being made in the Sunak household in the 1980s – but it may well be the case, as Sunak himself hints, that his parents didn’t want their gifted child distracted from his mental development by watching too much pulp television. Or they thought there were better uses for their money.

There may even have been an element of snobbery involved, because at the time having a satellite dish on your house was, to some, a visible sign of being a vulgar plebeian. A joke at the time went as follows. Question: What do you call the little box behind a satellite dish? Answer: A council house.

There was even a short-lived, upmarket rival to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky bread-and-circuses service that featured arts and current affairs programming. It was called BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting), and it pointedly used a rectangular dish, the so-called “squariel”, to distinguish its viewers from others with less discernment. Soon enough, Murdoch gobbled it up into “BSkyB”, and nothing now remains of it except a very faint cultural memory.

Anyway, Rishi famously married the daughter of a multi-billionaire, which was great for him, but has helped lumber him with an out-of-touch image. Or, rather, an even more out-of-touch image than most Conservatives, whatever their background, tend to suffer from. It is not helping him win the affection of the British people. There is a reason why British market researchers ask questions such as “Does this leader understand the problems faced by people like me?”, which Sunak bombs.

There’s not a thing he can do about it. The infamous clip now freely circulating of him as a teenager in a documentary correcting himself about having “working class” friends doesn’t help.

It’s not their fault. We fetishise the backgrounds of our politicians to an unrealistic degree – so much so that they are tempted into inverted snobbery and unwise embellishments. Can there be a single sentient being on these islands who doesn’t know that Keir Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker? (Even though our rapid de-industrialisation means no one any longer knows what a toolmaker did). That his mum was a nurse and his wife works in an NHS trust (the benediction of the NHS there once again)? That his dad had a Ford Cortina?

It is hardly new. A previous generation knew well that Margaret Thatcher’s father was a self-employed grocer, and that she helped out in a shop in Grantham. That Gordon Brown was a “son of the manse”. That, by contrast, David Cameron’s father was a stockbroker (rather like Nigel Farage’s) – something that didn’t feature heavily in his speeches. That John Major’s dad, more colourfully, worked in a circus and made garden gnomes but later went bust so that they lived in poverty.

It can attract ridicule as well as sympathy. Harold Wilson, whose father was an industrial chemist who suffered bouts of joblessness in the 1930s, once made a speech that tried to insinuate that they couldn’t afford shoes for him, because, at his school, “more than half the children in my class never had any boots or shoes to their feet”. To which a Tory opponent responded: “If Harold Wilson ever went barefoot to school, it was because he was too big for his boots.”

Wilson’s principal opponent, Edward Heath, whose dad was a builder/carpenter and mother a housemaid, let it be known that they did without so that they could buy their talented son a piano, and later get his organ scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. It’s not a bad thing that, for his own reasons, Ed Davey wants to share his experiences as a carer for his mum and then his son, but too many politicians can feel the pressure to “open up” about their past and their families. Others try to leverage it for professional advancement.

Perhaps the most pitiful example of this phenomenon is the now forgotten Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, whose brief career faltered after he, or others on his behalf, with or without his knowledge, claimed that he’d got a PhD, had played for Tranmere Rovers and was present at the Hillsborough disaster. Making capital from the past can be a hazardous game.

The truth, of course, is that it doesn’t matter if a brilliant stateswoman or statesman knows the price of milk, or ever did. No one judges Winston Churchill on the fact he was born in Blenheim Palace, nor that his father died from syphilis contracted from a chambermaid. Cameron didn’t blunder over Brexit because his father made money in the City and sent him to Eton. James Callaghan failed in the end as premier because the unions let him down in the Winter of Discontent; his upbringing in grinding poverty had no bearing on what came later.

On balance, we probably know too much about the private lives and pasts of those who want to govern us. It’s a natural sort of curiosity – but, frankly, trying to understand the fable of the Sunaks’ satellite dish isn’t getting us anywhere.