Emily is so at home in Islington luvvie-land, a metropolitan liberal allergic to the ideals of patriotism and the self-reliant family My youth was spent living alongside those champagne socialists who, like Emily Thornberry today, symbolised the hypocrisy of so many in the Labour elite. Tony Blair's house was the other side of the wall at the bottom of my family's garden in Islington - the area of North London that had become New Labour's spiritual home. Thornberry and her rich High Court judge husband now live in the same handsome crescent of 1850s Italianate villas - each now worth around £3 million. Nearby was Margaret Hodge, the multi-millionaire heiress and future Labour Culture Minister, who chose not to live in her Barking constituency in East London. Peter Mandelson lived just down the road in a lovely Victorian square. Politicians such as Emily Thornberry (left) live a gilded life. Right: Her townhouse in Islington From 1997, this group became the ruling political class, who lived smug existences so different from the working classes they affected to champion. Islington may be only 30 miles from Rochester as the crow flies but Thornberry's lifestyle is a million miles from that of the voters who form Labour's core support. It is different, too, from that of the thousands who live in the council estates that form much of Islington's housing stock. The borough has one of the highest proportions of council-owned buildings in the country. You can often see St George's flags in the windows of the council estates. But the Labour elite rarely see them. Even if they did, they would sneeringly assume they were flown by Right-wing extremists. These metropolitan liberals are allergic to the ideals of patriotism and the self-reliant family. Meanwhile, politicians such as Emily Thornberry live a gilded life, utterly segregated from hard-working, working-class voters. The same double standards existed in the Nineties, particularly when it came to education. The children of the council-house poor had no choice but to go to sub-standard state schools, wrecked by the Labour-controlled council. The Labour elite had the money to send their own children to private schools; or they used their power and "sharp elbows" to secure the few places at superior, selective, church-run schools - as did the Blairs. Tony Blair (left) and Margaret Hodge (right), the multi-millionaire heiress, were neighbours in Islington After a local Catholic primary, the Blair children were shipped out to the other side of the capital, to the high-performing London Oratory School in Fulham. A generation later, Thornberry followed suit, sending her daughter to a selective school far outside her constituency. Her mocking attitude to the working class this week was a vivid reminder to me of the attitude of the Labour elite in Islington in the run-up to the 1992 election. Just before the poll, I was ridiculed by a middle-aged, grand lady in a local betting shop for placing a bet on John Major winning for the Tories. "How could you!" she said, as she placed a losing bet on Labour. In 1845, the great Tory Benjamin Disraeli wrote about: "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." Disraeli was writing about the rich and the poor. Today, his words apply to Labour politicians and the working classes - the people whom they cynically claim to represent.