"A few months ago, the BBC asked me to debate with Labour's Simon Danczuk, who supported George Osborne's proposal to make people thrown out of work wait an extra week for benefits. I say "debate", because Mr Danczuk turned up with a few prepared personal attacks, finding me guilty of having lived in "the posh part of Stockport". If it really matters, I grew up in the town's second-most deprived ward: a more accurate ad hominem attack would have been that I grew up in a middle-class family, because my dad was a white-collar local authority worker and my mother was an IT lecturer at Salford University."