Otherwise I end up shaking hands with the babies and kissing the mothers

“Otherwise I end up shaking hands with the babies and kissing the mothers.”His early life was a struggle from the start. He had deeply loving parents, who were already middle-aged when he was born (and a maternal grandfather who fed an interest in politics by reading the Daily Herald to him from an early age). They undoubtedly reinforced his own remarkable determination not to let his blindness – the result of a freak incompatibility of his parents’ genes – hold him back. But the privations of his childhood and early youth were pretty breathtaking. Because the only local blind school was on the other side of Sheffield, he had to board there from the age of four in a regime that allowed parental visits on one half day a month. So traumatic was the separation on his first day that he can still remember the warmth of the late afternoon sun that Sunday in 1951 as they passed the cathedral, bell tolling, on their way to the school at Manchester Road.When he was 12, his father Arthur, a Gas Board employee, fell into a vat of boiling water because of the incompetence of a workmate.

He died, though not before his son had visited him in hospital and smelt his father’s terribly burnt flesh. Because Arthur Blunkett had agreed to work on after his retirement, the Gas Board, with staggering meanness, refused the normal compensation, plunging his mother into an abject poverty that meant at times there was only bread and dripping to eat. The catastrophe also meant that Blunkett went unhappily to his new boarding school, outside Shrewsbury, the consequent bullying and isolation compounded by the fact that his mother couldn’t afford to replace his shorts with long trousers. It is not surprising that he became a socialist.Or that he became passionate – and traditionalist – about education.

At 16, he had to fight to take GCEs against a headmaster whose eccentricity was to believe that his blind charges shouldn’t take exams. He battled through night school while working at the Gas Board to get the A-levels to become, to adapt Neil Kinnock’s phrase, the first Blunkett for a thousand generations to go to university.It was by becoming – at 33 – leader of Sheffield City Council that Blunkett rose to national prominence. It propelled him into the Labour National Executive as the first non-MP to be elected to the constituency section since Harold Laski He was never on the ultra-left. But he was on the softish left of the party well into the 1980s, remaining a unilateralist through the Kinnock era and clashing with Roy Hattersley – who would, ironically, a decade later accuse him of being too right-wing over grant-maintained schools – over what he saw as the need to raise taxes.Although he would become convinced of the need to purge Militant, at the famous 1985 conference Blunkett famously pleaded with its leader Derek Hatton to agree to open the books to a party enquiry. At the time Kinnock was infuriated because it appeared to blunt his attack Afterwards he relented. And certainly the enquiry was what turned the tables on Militant.So how far has the Home Secretary travelled politically since – despite the strong personal respect that Kinnock developed for him – his leftish “Blunkettry” used to irritate the Labour leadership? His critics will say he simply trimmed.