Well I was not expecting that answer. I had asked Sir Keir Starmer how he felt being laughed for mentioning again that his father was a toolmaker or worked in a factory.
It had happened on Wednesday night at a Sky News leaders’ event in Grimsby when the Labour leader – who was being grilled by journalists on the channel – said that his father was a tool maker, prompting laughter from several audience members.
Speaking to me in the car park of Crewe Alexandria FC a visibly angry Starmer told me: “My Dad worked in a factory all his life. He felt people disrespected him.
“It hit a nerve last night. He felt that – in the usual conversation when someone says ‘what do you do for a living?’ when socially, he would say ‘I work in a factory’, and there would be a pause, and nobody quite knew what to say.
“And he felt really disrespected. It caused him in his life to withdraw from social engagements. He didn’t do it much later in life, because it was raw to him that he should be disrespected because he worked in a factory.
“So when someone laughed last night, my Dad that would have turned in his grave.”
I asked if the chuckling was evidence of snobbishness towards his father: “I don’t know what caused someone to laugh, but if you’re laughing at someone because they work in a factory – that is the one thing that I think had a massive impact on someone like my dad, the disrespect,” he said.
“And it’s in me. You can see I’m angry about it, I am frustrated, because I will never allow that sort of disrespect for working people to be any part of my plans, any part of the Britain that I want as the future.”
What is going on here? I had asked the question as I felt the laughter showed that people were beginning to tire of his description of his father as a toolmaker who worked in a factory.
But he took it as a personal slight against his father, a man who he said had been forced to feel embarrassed about his blue collar background. Starmer’s response was real, and visceral.
Plenty of social media users think Starmer got the wrong end of the stick. But – frankly – who are they to judge? Starmer has seen for himself his blue collar dad being patronised by others when he was growing up.
And he spoke out against it when he detected it in the Sky audience. Good for him.