Marcus Rashford’s campaign is popular. The Tories don’t realise that, in a pandemic, kindness is a strength not a weakness
When Marcus Rashford was a boy, he would sometimes hear his exhausted mother crying herself to sleep. She worked full time in minimum-wage jobs to support her five children, but still there wasn’t always enough to go round. As he once put it, “if there was food on the table, there was food on the table”, and if not he didn’t moan about feeling hungry.
When his gift for football became obvious, she wangled him into Manchester United’s youth academy a year early, because it came with catered accommodation; finally, a guarantee that he’d be eating enough through the ravenous teenage years. Rashford got lucky, but knows full well that other children didn’t – and raising millions to combat food poverty has become his way of paying it back.
