Blunkett's past

The Economist has been considering the new British Home Secretary David Blunkett's politics to be more right-wing than his predecessor, Jack Straw. "Whatever people think of his politics," the paper writes, "Mr Blunkett is universally admired for his personal odyssey. Born almost completely blind, at the age of four he was taken from home and deposited in a special boarding school on the far side of Sheffield, where the boys in his dormitory cried themselves to sleep at night. He was still a child when his father died a slow and painful death, after falling into a vat of boiling water at a gas-works. A headstone was beyond the family's means, so he was buried in an unmarked grave".