Hilary Benn
The Christian name gives it away - you don't get many male Hilarys to the half pound on the housing estates of Leeds Central, where shadow communities and local government secretary Benn has his safe seat. Here is a toff with beautiful manners and an inherited fortune. His grandfather, William Wedgwood Benn, a baronet's son, was made 1st Viscount Stansgate after a political career. Various Benn cousins, firm Harrovians, continue to flourish - the current baronet, Sir Jonathan, was a City grandee. Another kinsman is Timothy Benn, stalwart of the Flyfishers' Club, piscatorial equivalent of the MCC. Hilary's pipe-sucking socialist father Tony renounced the Stansgate peerage in 1963 in order to pursue his Commons career. At his death last year, the viscountcy passed to Hilary's lobbyist brother Stephen, who is using it to try to return to the House of Lords under the arcane by-election system for hereditary peers. The Benn dynasty does not stop there. Stephen's daughter Emily wants to be a Labour MP. Her occupation? Investment banker, naturally.
Harriet Harman
She often omits her aitches these days - it's 'Arriet 'Arman, ta very much - but Labour's deputy leader is dead posh, even while her party accuses her distant cousin David Cameron of being a toff. She has a link to the pulsatingly patrician Pakenhams, her late aunt Elizabeth having been Countess of Longford and first cousin (once removed) of the Tory prime minister Neville Chamberlain. 'Arriet is thus a kinswoman - kinsperson, perhaps of Lady Antonia Fraser (Mrs Harold Pinter) and Lady Rachel Billington (who, eek, married a chap called Kevin - but he went to Bryanston and is
in the Garrick). Harriet's Tory father was
a pillar of the medical establishment - a Harley Street physician. Her childhood was as comfortable as that of the Banks family
in Mary Poppins. 'Right Hon' in more than one sense, Old Paulina Harriet married her bit of rough: pink-as-nougat trade unionist Jack Dromey. This hoi polloi malarkey has its limits, though. Harriet and Jack have a lovely country house in Suffolk and play the game for their children. When son Harry left uni, he walked into an internship with a PR firm run by Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson. Connections, connections, connections. It's the old gilded-elite way.
Tristram Hunt
Lovely Tristram, shadow education secretary, is an Old Gower - meaning a former pupil of University College School, Hampstead, where moneyed bien-pensants have long
sent their sproglets. Fellow Old Gower
lefties include novelist Will Self and BBC2 Newsnight editor Ian Katz. Tristram
was picked up, if that is the term, by Lord Mandelson as a political researcher in the Nineties. His upper-class vowels and lugubrious airs went down well in Blair's New Labour. Tris's dad Julian is a member of the House of Lords and sits as Lord Hunt of Chesterton, in the Labour interest. Julian's own father, Roland, was a classics scholar
at Rugby and went into the Foreign Office, where he became a slightly accident-prone diplomat (his achievements included helping pick the Malaysian national anthem). In his 30s, Tristram flowered as a telly historian, prancing around battlefields, before becoming MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central in 2010. His brother-in-law is writer Giles Foden; other cousins include peer Lady Bottomley and her Tory MP husband, Sir Peter.
Tessa Jowell
When New Labour set out on its 'prawn cocktail offensive' in the City in the Nineties, earnest-eyed Dame Tessa did much the same exercise with the capital's media types, persuading them that Labour was no longer brutish and hard-left. She went
to the capital's dinner-party circuit and, in the words of Mrs Thatcher, showed she was 'one of us'. Calm, collected Tessa was schooled at St Margaret's in Aberdeen, the Roedean of Scotland. Its motto is 'Tenez Ferme', meaning 'Hold Fast' - not 'Hold On to the Farm'. In the Blair years, she became culture secretary and was emollient enough to survive the Brown Terrors and to serve during Gordon's premiership too. Jowell is a summer fixture in Tuscany, her occasionally estranged husband David having been a controversial associate
of ex-Italian PM Silvio 'Bunga Bunga' Berlusconi. You have to Tenez Ferme to your knicker elastic when randy Silvio's around!
Margaret Hodge
Lady Hodge, as she does not style herself, is not just highfalutin in her accent and her sweeping denunciations; she is also wildly well-orf, dripping jewellery and grandeur. The title comes courtesy of her late second husband, Sir Henry, a High Court judge. She was born an Oppenheimer and the family was, and remains, properly rich, thanks in part to family firm Stemcor. Earlier in her career, she was a steaming leftie and leader of Islington Council. Having somehow survived crises and scandals - not to mention the disadvantage of being, well, less than entirely bright - she currently presides over the Public Accounts Committee, Madame Defarge in a Chanel suit.
Chuka Umunna
The shadow business secretary, a sometime cathedral chorister, should be called Pukka Umunna. Though he airbrushes his mother Patricia out of his Who's Who entry, she is the daughter of the Irish-born late High Court judge Sir Helenus Milmo, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials. Sir Helenus was in MI5 and such an honourable gent that he failed to spot that his boss Kim Philby was a traitor. Cripes! According to Irish Pedigrees, name Milmo comes from Gaelic for 'devotee of the cows' and the Milmos made their fortune by marrying into the landed O'Dowds and Creans in County Sligo. In the 19th century, one of Chuka's forebears, Daniel Milmo, founded the Milmo National Bank in Texas. Another kinsman, Don Patricio Milmo, married the daughter of a prominent general who propped up Mexico's ill-fated Emperor Maxmilian I. Is that where smooth-as-butter Chuka gained his inspiration to prop up Ed Miliband? Don't rule out privately educated Chuka as a future Labour leader. Women love his eyelashes and his coy difficulty with the letter 'r'. In the Commons, he pouts, tiny scowls showing disappointment, little tugs of his lovely lips betraying amusement. The way he looks at his wristwatch or crosses his legs is a work of art. Put on Sade's 'Smooth Operator' and the picture is complete.
Fiona Mactaggart
This stentorian former Home Office minister has three houses, including a spread on Islay. In the Blairite landslide of 1997, she took the then-marginal seat of Slough and has held on to it with a diminishing majority - she does not have much of a bedside manner. The seat used to be linked with Eton. Not that Fiona, who went to Cheltenham Ladies' College, would be intimidated by tailcoated boys. They'd be more likely to run a mile from this sternly socialist lady who has the bite and bark of an excited goose. During Commons debates, she expresses disgust by making loud honks, causing Speaker John Bercow to leap from his chair. Her dad was Sir Ian Auld Mactaggart, 3rd Baronet, a stonkingly rich Scottish property developer who stood for the Tories in the 1945 and 1970 elections. The old boy was also chairman of the Society for Individual Freedom and left Fiona a tidy million and more when he died in 1987. The Mactaggart baronetcy's arms show two owls and a tower with the motto 'For Commonweal and Liberty'. Fiona's paternal great-grandfather, Sir John, the 2nd Baronet, an early smoked- salmon socialist, acted as treasurer of the first-ever branch of the Labour party. Her maternal grandfather was Sir Herbert Williams, 1st Baronet and a Tory MP. There is a fine photograph of him in the National Portrait Gallery. He looks not unlike a character from the novels of John Buchan.
Nick Raynsford
Former planning minister Raynsford styles himself a matey 'Nick' but his real name is Wyvill Richard Nicolls Raynsford and he is, my dears, one of the Milton Malsor Manor Raynsfords from Northants, who have been supplying local squires since roughly the 15th century. The young Wyvill was packed off to Repton for his schooling in the mid-Fifties, followed by Cambridge (Sidney Sussex), where he was rusticated for high jinks. He later mixed with the Sloanes and cravatted Herberts at Chelsea School of Art at the height of the flower-power era and was radicalised by the Vietnam War. These days, his accent is classless, but there are moments - when he stands there, blinking behind his spectacles, with a sticky, 'egad' sort of smile on his chops - that the breeding shows and you could be lookin' at one of Bertie Wooster's monocled chums from the Drones Club.
Shaun Woodward
Woodward may not have been
born posh but he has certainly shimmered up the social ladder since his days as one of Esther Rantzen's munchkins on That's Life. Marriage in 1987 to Camilla Sainsbury (daughter of Tory MP Tim and part of the supermarket dynasty) was the making of him; they are as at ease in Mayfair as they are on Long Island. Home used to be Sarsden House, Oxfordshire, when cigar-puffing networker Shaun was Tory MP for Witney, but then he defected to Labour at the urging of his pal Lord Mandelson. He bought a tiny home in his Merseyside
seat, but there was no room there for Shaun's butler. Sarsden was sold in 2006 for £24m. Ex-Northern Ireland secretary Woodward will be quitting the Commons in 2015 to spend more time with his friends in Mustique.
By Quentin Letts who writes for the Daily Mail.
