Show caption ‘A law degree and the Bar gave the means and skills to try and improve lives like mine had been.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo Opinion We’re too fixated on class. What matters is our ability to understand others Jolyon Maugham Katie Hopkins’ criticisms of my background were wrong. But whether born into poverty or wealth, we must try to see the world through others’ eyes Thu 31 Aug 2017 04.09 EDT Share on Facebook

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Our class shapes us no less than our colour or our gender. If you are cultivated in a hot-house, born into money, sheltered by it, how do you understand what it is like to fear homelessness because you can’t meet your rent? But if you grow wild, exposed to the elements, you quickly learn how poverty tends to rot your dignity, stunt you and leave you morally compromised. Live that experience and it shapes you always.

So when Katie Hopkins accused me on Twitter of being out-of-touch with the majority of people thanks to me having an Eton-educated father called Benedictus, it seemed right to answer.

I was born in 1971 to an impressionable young woman studying sociology at North London Poly, the first member of her family to go to university. She was introduced to David Benedictus – then famous as the writer who had blown the lid on Eton with The Fourth of June – by a mutual friend. They slept together, and the rest is history.

I have the dignified letters she wrote to him. “I do not expect you to marry me”, she says in them, “but you need to know I am pregnant”. They sit on my shelf next to carbon copy responses from his lawyers. “Our client denies paternity”, they say, “but will make a nuisance payment of £5 a week until she marries”.

When my mother graduated in 1972 she emigrated with her parents, and me, to New Zealand. There she joined a teachers’ training college, where she met and married Alan. They had a child together in 1975 and, around that time, he adopted me.

Every parent knows that to parent is to fail. My parents did their best but Alan and I never had an easy relationship. And at 16, still at school, vulnerable, they asked me to leave. They paid about £8 a week into my bank account until I finished school but it was not enough to live on. I took a job cleaning up after my peers at the girls’ school. Still I did not have the money to live independently. So I moved in with a teacher from the school – a man who took an interest in boys my age – and then into the house of a depressed bachelor in his 50s who vacillated between unsuccessful ventures with prostitutes and passes at me. Only in novels do poverty and dignity make easy bedfellows.

Privilege implies an obligation to understand people who experience the establishment as venal and uncaring

After finishing school with mediocre grades, I took a year out in England. I lived initially in the north-east in Highfield, built on the site of a former coke-works outside Rowlands Gill, with my grandfather’s family. My mother finally told me about David and I met him for the first time. I changed my surname from my adoptive father’s back to my mother’s maiden name, Maugham, and, with David’s help, in time got a clerical job at the BBC. My work there – including a feature on New Zealand poetry and a play I wrote – was enough to persuade Durham to offer me a university place, despite my grades.

Then came professional success – a law degree and then the bar – and with it the means and skills to try and improve lives like mine had been. I chaired Gingerbread, the charity for single parents, and the Fatherhood Institute, which sought to encourage fathers to become more engaged in the lives of their children. Having seen how tax avoidance corroded public trust in the establishment and our ability to fund tax credits for working families, I campaigned for and worked with both the Conservative and Labour parties for a fairer tax system. I continue to work for that now: I am the claimant in a case that seeks to recover £1bn of VAT dodged by Uber. My work for a better Brexit or none at all feels to me a very natural extension of those concerns.

Who we are matters, but it does not define us. Denial is not the best answer to the allegation “you are posh”. If you accept that being born poor is not a moral judgment, the same must be true of being born wealthy. Martin Moore-Bick’s life of privilege does not disqualify him from chairing the Grenfell inquiry. Zac Goldsmith’s policies on social housing during the London mayoral election in 2016 suggested he had the capacity to overcome the emotional handicap of wealth. I defended both publicly against criticisms of their privilege.

But privilege does imply a moral obligation to understand people whose experience of the establishment is that it is venal and uncaring. I believe there is something special about poverty and the way it drowns out dignity. But what matters, ultimately, is not where we were born but whether we care enough and remain interested enough to try and see the world through the eyes of others who are not like us.