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She thinks the bailiffs were wearing bowler hats when they marched up the front path to turf her family out of their home. It was a long time ago, and Emily Thornberry was only seven, so some of the details have become hazy.

And yet the trauma of that day, when she, her younger brothers and her mother were made homeless without a penny to their name, clearly lives large in the Shadow Foreign Secretary’s mind.

Now tipped to be the first woman leader of the Labour Party (although she predictably scoffs at such disloyal chatter) it is clear the events of that dreadful day have driven her ever since.

“My father left us when I was seven and just disappeared. We had absolutely no money. My mum was 30 with three young children. She couldn’t pay the mortgage, she couldn’t work and in the end we got chucked out.

“I don’t know if this is a false memory, but I have a memory of bailiffs coming. And it was the 1960s so they were wearing bowler hats.

“The cats had to be put down. I suppose my mum just couldn’t cope with three kids, no money, going into council housing... and cats.”

It explains the contradictions which crackle within Ms Thornberry, 57. There is the jolly hockey sticks aura set against an education at a failing secondary modern. There is the tweet of a house flying three England flags, deemed to be sneering, which got her fired by Ed Miliband , in contrast to surviving on food parcels as a kid.

And then there is the successful legal career, marriage to a judge and a home in London’s leafier streets, which all feels super-Blairite. And yet she is a darling of the Corbynistas.

Certainly life began very comfortably for Emily Thornberry “at the top of the hill” in Guildford, Surrey.

(Image: REUTERS)

Her parents were both left-leaning. Her mother was a teacher and dad Cedric was “in the United Nations ” (well, Assistant Secretary-General).

She says: “He was very successful, sort of an international guy. He was a great man, but a terrible father.”

Quite how terrible became apparent when it emerged he had cheated on his wife Sallie and then fled the family home abandoning her, Emily, seven, and her brothers, aged five and three.

Ms Thornberry says: “There was a woman who lived in the town, and he had a child with her. My poor mum. It was so humiliating. I think he went to Norway. The courts couldn’t touch him.”

A local Labour councillor, Bill Bellerby, helped the family get benefits and find a council house. She says: “So we moved down from the hill, the really posh bit, and at first we lived in the centre of town in a little council house.

“And then Mr Bellerby said there was this new bit of the estate being built out in Bellfields and there would be more space. We didn’t think we’d like it, moving out of the town, but we loved it. And that’s where my mum became a Labour councillor.”

Mr Bellerby died, aged 100, at the start of this week. She says: “We owe him so much.”

The importance of having a safety net in a time of crisis has remained with her ever since.

She says: “People gave us food parcels and bags of clothes. We had tins of Campbell’s meatballs given to us, which was really kind, but we hated them. If we refused to eat our dinner, our mum would say, ‘You’ll have to have Campbell’s meatballs’.”

She laughs, but adds quietly: “It was hard, it was really hard.” Little was seen of her father for several years. She says: “He went to all kinds of war zones and was in Bosnia and got held hostage in Mostar. I used to find out about it through the media. There was one report about Cedric Thornberry finding a bullet in his bedroom. I was like, ‘What?’.”

She failed her 11-plus and ended up at the secondary modern. “It was rubbish,” she says. “Really bad. There was absolutely no aspiration. You could do five O-levels, but two had to be in technical subjects.”

The gulf in aspiration and achievement between her classmates and those at the grammar schools nearby was blindingly apparent. It was another building block in Emily’s growing political consciousness.

She says: “I remember asking my careers teacher, ‘What do you think I’m going to do with my life?’, and he said, ‘You can always visit people in prison ’. And I did. I became a criminal barrister and I visited people in prison, but it wasn’t in the way he expected.”

She admits that kind of attitude left its mark. “Yeah, I’m really chippy, but have chips on both shoulders – for balance.”

At 15, she went off the rails. She says: “Mum and I fell out big time, and she took me up to London and left me on my dad’s doorstep. As we’d been brought up to believe he was the sort of devil incarnate it was the ultimate punishment. Then when I was 17, Dad went to New York for the weekend to see the UN and he didn’t come back.

“I could stay in the house and I had a car. I loved it and the parties I had were amazing. But it was terrible really. I was fundamentally very lonely, and angry.

“Angry at everybody really. Angry about not being expected to do well. Angry at feeling like I was nothing.”

But coupled with anger was a growing sense of motivation.

She retook her O-levels, sat A-levels and got herself to Canterbury University and on to Bar School, where she met her husband Christopher Nugee. She says: “He’s a lovely posh boy. He’s kind, clever – and he just loved me.”

(Image: Daily Mirror)

From there she swept upwards in the law and into politics, becoming MP for Islington in 2005.

Along the way she had three children.

Her political career hit a wall in 2014 after she posted the flag of St George picture. But she worked her way back into favour and could reach the top of the Labour Party if Jeremy Corbyn , now 68, moves on. A female leader is, after all, long overdue. “Oh no,” she laughs.

“If I’m going to change jobs, which I hope I will do soon, I would be Foreign Secretary. And I don’t want to be unduly big-headed here, but I think I would make a much better job of it than Boris.”

So, what her next job will be remains to be seen. But if her past is anything to go by, her future will be far from dull.