Marcus Rashford: How Manchester United’s number 10 caused consternation in No 10

Sean O'Grady looks at the rise of the striker whose child poverty campaign has taken hold across the nation

Rashford celebrates a hat-trick this week against RB Leipzig (Reuters)

So, happy birthday, Marcus Rashford, born at Halloween, 1997. It is a further coincidence, entirely, but interesting to note, that his arrival came roughly at the same time as the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government and, shortly after, its vow to end child poverty within 20 years. If all had gone according to plan, Britain would now be celebrating a landmark social liberation, and hungry kids would be a thing of the past.  

Well, as we all know, the poor and the hungry are still with us, and while New Labour’s policy never came of age – the target was dropped by the Conservative government in 2016 – its greatest proponent, Rashford, has reached a remarkable political maturity. More than anyone for a decade or more, Rashford has put child poverty firmly back in the political agenda.  

Such was his success over the summer, when he launched his first campaign to extend free school meals into the holidays, that 1.3 million children were fed who might otherwise have gone without. They might, in other words, have suffered the same pain that he movingly described in his open letter to Conservative MPs: “My mum worked full-time, earning minimum wage to make sure we always had a good evening meal on the table. But it was not enough. The system was not built for families like mine to succeed, regardless of how hard my mum worked.