Labour's Happy Warrior

The courage of his convictions is something David Blunkett comes by naturally. Blind from birth, sent to a boarding school at four where he was desperately lonely and steered toward becoming a piano tuner, he learned to ride a bike, play cricket (the ball had a bell) and toboggan madly down hills; broken bones were just a cost of doing business. He remembers the smell of his dad's rotting flesh as he slowly died after falling in a vat of boiling water at work, for which his employer refused compensation, driving him and his mother into "bread and dripping" poverty. Even...