CHILDHOOD misery may be partly to blame for a politician’s choice of career, according to a new study of bullied children.

The findings may help to explain the destinies of politicians from Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, to Lord Archer, the Tory peer, and Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator — all of whom were bullied at school.

According to the research, children who have endured rejection and tears in the playground at an early age often later seek refuge in organisations, such as political parties and charities, that are keen to welcome newcomers. The more finely honed sense of injustice acquired by bullied children may also draw them to membership of groups that seek to change society.

“These kinds of civic engagement activities come with less of a threat of being rejected,” said Karen Robson, the researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University who carried out the study. “If you go to a Labour party meeting or a church group, there is less of a risk of people ridiculing you and telling you to go away.”

More cynically, other commentators have suggested that the victims of bullies may thirst for revenge throughout their lives and thus claw their way to positions of power from which they can heap misery on others.

However, Robson’s research suggests that every sneering Flashman — the fictional Victorian super-cad who delighted, while at Rugby school, in toasting smaller boys in front of roaring fires — may unwittingly create dozens of future politicians and voluntary workers.

She analysed data on 16,000 people born during April 1970, as part of a study to be published tomorrow. She found that a child who was socially rejected by his or her peers at the age of 10 was 60% more likely to become “civically engaged” at the age of 29 than a popular child.

To measure “civic engagement”, Robson looked at whether those surveyed had joined a voluntary organisation, such as a political party, charity or church group.

“The more they had been experiencing alienation aged 10 — bullying, emotional abuse from their peers — the more likely they were to report, aged 29, involvement in a voluntary organisation,” said Robson.

“It could very well be that having experienced emotional abuse they wanted to prevent it elsewhere. It could also be about achieving some kind of status that they can’t have in regular social spheres.”

While also discovering that severely alienated children were more likely to become depressed in later life, Robson said the link between being bullied and later civic engagement was the most surprising finding.

Ivan Lewis, the junior education minister who wants “zero tolerance” for bullying in schools and communities, revealed earlier this year that his school days had been blighted by bullies and spoke of “the sense of isolation and loneliness, the suppressed anger and the feeling in the pit of my stomach every morning as I set off for school”.

At the age of 14 he began teaching people with learning difficulties before going on to careers in the voluntary sector and politics. Lewis said last week: “My involvement in voluntary work from the age of 14 made a real difference to my confidence and self-esteem. It helped me to overcome the bullying which blighted my early teenage years and ultimately led me to choose a career in the voluntary sector.

“These childhood experiences made me determined to use my current position to lead a new national ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to bullying.”

At school in Somerset, Archer was known as “Mekon” — after a grotesque comic book alien — and also “Pune” on account of his slight physique. One classmate reportedly said, “He was badly disliked. There was a fat boy that used to sit on him”, and he is also said to have had his head pushed down a lavatory.

Straw suffered while a boarder at Brentwood school, Essex, and has confessed that he later became a bully himself, persecuting a fellow pupil. “It was verbal, psychological, insidious and, in many ways, the worse for that,” Straw once said of his own vindictiveness.

In common with many ginger-haired children, the young Neil Kinnock, former Labour leader and now vice-president of the European commission, was taunted and, aged 12, was regularly beaten up by older children.

In 1993 he said: “It was not just physically painful — and it certainly was that — but it was absolutely humiliating. I remember that hideous, dry terrified feeling — a complete lack of confidence, complete humiliation inside myself. If you were in your early teens, tubby and ginger, you were a target.”

John Major, the former Conservative prime minister, was unhappy at Rutlish grammar school, west London, and has said that he felt “alienation” there before finding acceptance and companionship by joining the Young Conservatives.

Possibly explaining his later interest in doing good, the Prince of Wales claimed to have endured bullying at Gordonstoun, the spartan Scottish school. He once wrote in a letter: “It’s such hell here, especially at night the people in my dormitory are foul they throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows it’s such a HOLE this place.”

Some tyrants have a history of being bullied. They include Stalin and Saddam Hussein, whose reputedly miserable childhood helped to turn him into a “malignant narcissist”, according to an American psychiatric study.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, said: “Stalin had a very unhappy childhood and was laughed at because he had a withered arm.”

Barry Sheerman, chairman of the House of Commons select committee on education, said: “I have met children who have been bullied and I think it gives you that edge, that insight into what it’s like to be exploited, to be the underdog, to feel a real sense of rage and injustice.”

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