Over the coming days, two very different lives will be the focus of national attention.

One is that of an Eton and Oxford-educated Baronet with a career behind him as a city financier. The other emerged from Avondale High School in Stockport with no qualifications after dropping out at 16 after she became pregnant. Her own mother, one of 12 kids born to unemployed parents, had bipolar disorder and struggled to cope.

As a result, that little girl who would go on to become Deputy Prime Minister remembers the house being a tip, tidemarks of dirt being visible on her skin, and eating sausage with chips – or chips with chips – for tea. On Sundays they walked two miles to her nan’s high-rise for a bath. At five years old she played on the local railway tracks.

Could the lives of Angela Rayner

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