Hazel Blears has placed her working-class origins at the heart of her campaign to be the deputy Labour leader.

At the start, when she visited Salford in February to declare her candidacy, her father, Arthur, was there to watch and ever since, from the modest semi in Swinton, where Hazel spent her teenage years, the retired maintenance fitter and his wife, Dorothy, have been willing their “hard-working and enthusiastic” daughter to victory.

“I grew up in Salford in the Fifties and Sixties”, Ms Blears, 51, said at a recent husting, describing how her parents left school at 14 and her brother drives a Manchester bus. “I don’t need a sociologist to talk to me about the white working class. I did it the hard way, and that makes you pretty tough.”

The largely middle-class London audience was suitably impressed and, after an enthusiastic performance, Ms Blears, the party chairman and the success story of the campaign so far, topped a straw poll.

Some might criticise her for exploiting her past, but Ms Blears’s “journey from Salford to the Cabinet table”, as it is headlined on her website, is not simply a creation of political spin. Nor, it seems, is her statement that Salford remains the centre of her universe.

It was the planned closure of the maternity unit at Hope Hospital in Salford before Christmas that prompted the normally ultra-loyal Ms Blears to protest against NHS cuts, and the chairman of Salford’s rugby league team has chipped in £10,000 to fund her campaign.

Nobody who has met her parents can doubt the impact that they have had on her. From them she takes her diminutive stature and her energy and Labour heritage.

Her mother’s response to Ms Blears’s deputy leadership campaign was typical: “We are so, so proud. People say they are thrilled about it when we go out dancing.” With that, she demonstrated the cha-cha-cha while her husband made her a cup of tea. The Blearses go dancing three times a week, another passion that their daughter, a member of the Division Belles troupe of tap-dancing women MPs, appears to have inherited.

They have also kept fit by pounding the streets in support of her various election campaigns. “We have been knocking on doors since she was a councillor in Eccles,” Mr Blears, 77, said. He made no suggestion that his daughter’s achievements were any more remarkable because of a tough start in life, including a forced move as a child when the Blears home was demolished as part of a slum clearance programme. Instead, he proudly described a happy family life.

Even by 11, when her parents tried to secure her a funded place at a private school, her sense of working-class identity was established. She passed the exam but told him: “It’s too elite, Dad. I don’t want to go. It’s just not me.”

She went instead to Wardley Grammar School, having passed the 11-plus examination. As she told the London hustings: “My brother did not. He failed the 11-plus. He drives a bus – I am in the Cabinet.”

She railed against the perceived injustice of this, but her career, serving under a Fettes-educated prime minister, has inevitably brought differences in lifestyle between her and her family. Her home outside London is still Salford, but a far leaf-ier neighbourhood, and the motorbikes that she rides with her husband, Michael Halsall, a lawyer, do not come cheap.

For a moment, there appeared to be a divergence of political opinion too. “When Tony goes, it will not be a closure of Iraq, but it will hopefully cool it a bit,” Mr Blears said, of the man that his daughter has so faithfully served for a decade.

Then the loyalty and optimism resurfaced, and Mrs Blears said: “Hazel would draw the party together as deputy leader. We want a fourth term. The pensioners we see at dancing say they have never been so well off.”

Life and times

Born Salford, May 14, 1956
1978 Trainee solicitor for Salford City Council
1984 Elected as Salford councillor
1987 Loses in Tatton against Neil Hamilton
1989 Marries Michael Halsall
1992 Loses in Bury South
1997 Elected as Salford MP
1998 Parliamentary Private Secretary to Alan Milburn
2001 Junior health minister
2003 Policing minister. Elected to Labour NEC
2006 Appointed Labour Party chairman

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