Some uphill political battles tackled by certain idealistic, although monetarily underfinanced, outsiders truly tug at the heartstrings. The BBC reports:

Tamsin Dunwoody, Labour’s candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, has defended her campaign’s portrayal of her Conservative rival as a “toff“…

…It follows the death of long-serving MP Gwyneth Dunwoody - Ms Dunwoody’s mother - who passed away last month…

…She told the BBC her campaign had used “good visual imagery of the difference between my opponent and myself”.

…”I don’t have a £53m pound fortune supporting me. I don’t have a £1.5m mansion. I am just a single, unemployed mother of five fighting hard for a job,” she said…

Relatedly, yesterday in The Sunday Express:

…The bitter battle for supremacy in Crewe and Nantwich sparked further accusations of hypocrisy when it emerged that Ms Dunwoody owns a mansion in the Welsh countryside. Papers obtained from the Land Registry show that Ms Dunwoody’s home, “Cwarre-Dduon” is set in 1.5 acres of land – twice the size of Mr Timpson’s family home in Tarporley.

Ms Dunwoody’s property is 175 miles from the Cheshire constituency where she hopes to become MP and is estimated to be worth about £850,000, well out of reach of voters in Crewe, where the price of an average terraced house is about £124,000.

Ms Dunwoody, who also goes by the name Moyra Tamsin Dunwoody-Kneafsey, is a third-generation member of a Labour family. As well as being the daughter of Gwyneth Dunwoody, she is the granddaughter of former Government whip Baroness Phillips…

It’s all a matter of perspective. Ms Dunwoody may well be telling the “narrow” truth. For starters, she doesn’t have “£53 million”, nor does she have a £1.5 million “mansion”.

Hers is worth only £850,000. While currently seeking a job as an MP, she is technically unemployed because she was made redundant/laid off ousted by voters from her previous job as a deputy minister in the Welsh Assembly. And she doesn’t go by her double-barrelled name.

However, as for being (a now) single mother, raising a family, that’s no handicap: after all, Labour’s view appears to be that fathers aren’t necessary.

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UPDATE: In case you didn’t know (and Labour apparently doesn’t), it is now “trendy” to be Tory.