“What matters about Christmas,” he goes on, face shining like a choirboy on Prozac, “is the presents.”. Britain in 1904 looks at first glance like a foreign country: 40 per cent of families had no running water or sanitation, landowners had a veto on laws and most adults didn’t have the vote. Yet in other ways it’s not so distant: 10,000 British citizens alive today were alive then, and we share with the Edwardians the divide between a tiny minority of the super rich, and poverty entrenched in precisely the same places that Charles Booth mapped in his surveys. But we know that where you are born or live shapes what you become, whether through the direct impact of crime or schools, or less directly through contacts and opportunities.

As you travel eastwards along London’s Central Line, every stop means a year lower life expectancy. In parts of England there are wards where no one has a university education and streets where no one has a job.After the sharp rise in poverty in the 1980s, a lot of progress has been made: unemployment has fallen sharply, child poverty is coming down, school results have improved fastest in poor areas and many of the grimmest estates are being improved.But its unlikely to be enough. We need not only money, drive and imagination but also political commitment over many decades. As HR Mencken once wrote, “for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat … and wrong.” But a country that has successfully contained the once intractable problems of mass unemployment and high inflation should be able to put poverty into the history books, and end forever the situation where having the wrong postcode is a life-threatening condition.. It ended just like every previous ministerial resignation. The Prime Minister expresses his total confidence in a beleaguered cabinet minister.

Every cabinet minister and Labour MP interviewed by the media expresses their total support and stresses how he has done nothing wrong. But ultimately the minister becomes utterly disabled and is unable to carry out his normal duties. This is a massive blow not only to David Blunkett but also to Tony Blair. The Prime Minister put the whole weight of his authority behind his favourite minister and has been made to look as foolish as his Home Secretary. The initial judgment of the media, the Opposition and the general political class was that if anyone could “tough it out” it would be Mr Blunkett. Any other minister ­ Peter Mandelson, Ron Davies, Geoffrey Robinson or Stephen Byers ­ would have been forced out over a fortnight ago.

The Home Secretary was always able to get away with more than anyone else. His physical disability enabled him to gain respect and admiration when, on previous occasions, he dropped the odd clanger.Mr Blunkett will be missed by Tony Blair because he was able to reach parts of the electorate ­ especially middle-class Tories worried about law and order ­ that others could not. But he was also a popular ­ as well as populist ­ Home Secretary in the eyes of those on the council estates, from which he himself originated, where crime disfigured the lives of the less well-off. His main enemies came from the chattering classes angry at his willingness to criticise judges and his all too cavalier attitudes to the traditional safeguards to democracy. Anger across the political spectrum led him to be on the receiving end of severe criticism.

A growing number of Labour MPs were getting nervous at his attacks on jury trials ­ and he caused controversy wherever he went.But the bizarre love affair with Kimberly Quinn, which began in 2001, was to overshadow what was otherwise a successful personal ministerial career. Few were aware of this emotional aspect of Mr Blunkett’s life until the news surfaced in a Sunday tabloid earlier this summer. For several weeks the story was presented as a happy love affair. The situation changed when it emerged that the relationship was actually breaking up and that Mr Blunkett may have had a hand in leaking the story to the newspapers in the hope of embarrassing Mrs Quinn. Some reports suggested that this would encourage her to leave her husband for the Home Secretary.