Bridget Phillipson slams Tories for their ‘manufactured smear’ targeting her mother’s council house

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has hit back at the Tories for descending into the gutter and launching a ‘manufactured smear’ targeting her family, after they criticised the profit her family made from the sale of her mother’s council house.

The Mail on Sunday reported that the sale of Bridget Phillipson’s childhood home generated a profit of £90,000, with the Tories accusing senior Labour figures of “pulling up the drawbridge” through restrictions to the Right to Buy scheme.

Last week saw Badenoch condemned for launching a bitter personal attack on Bridget Phillipson at PMQs, calling her a “spiteful class warrior” for adding VAT to private school fees, with the feud between the pair continuing.

The speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, had to intervene at the time and remind Badenoch of the use of her language.

Now, the Tory supporting press have also ramped up the attacks on Phillipson, reporting that in 1990, when Ms Phillipson was six years old, her mother Clare bought their two-bedroomed council house in Washington, Tyne and Wear, for £9,600 under the Right to Buy scheme brought in by the Conservatives.

The house remained in the family’s ownership, before it was sold in May 2023 for £99,950, which the newspaper described as “a profit of more than 900 per cent”. 

However, the Mail of course failed to take inflation into account. According to the Bank of England’s official inflation calculator, £99,950 in 2023 is equivalent to around £42,200 in 1990.

However, Phillipson has hit back, calling it a ‘manufactured smear’ and yet another ‘personalised attack’.

She told Times Radio: “I think it represents just a continuation of the nonsense that we’ve seen in recent days from the Conservative Party. It’s a manufactured smear on my family.”