I’m Jack Monroe, and I’m one in a million. I am one in a million people – and more – who have been referred to a foodbank in recent years, reliant on a small parcel of emergency food when the unplanned overdraft smashed open by a bounced electricity bill spirals into bank charges and late payment charges and ends up with rent arrears and the threat of eviction and an unplugged, empty fridge. It happened so quickly, the debt, exacerbated by the steep financial penalties for having no money, over and over and over again. Within two months I had gone from a full-time, salaried job in Essex County Fire and Rescue Service to sobbing on the phone to the energy company, begging them not to turn off the heating in a flat with cold laminate flooring and large windows, occupied by a baby boy who was not yet two years old. I was once paid on the 15th of every month. The rent, gas, electricity, water, council tax, sewage, phone bill, gym membership and TV licence came out of my bank account the same day. In, and straight out, and whatever was left went on food, clothing for a growing boy and the occasional nice time. Until it didn’t. Until that certainty of ‘bills paid’ was taken away and threw me at the mercy of a local council whose answering machine blithely informed me that there was ‘a six-week delay in processing new Housing Benefit claims’. Those six weeks turned into eleven, from November, to December, to January. I waited, phoned, wrote letters, cried, screamed, turned up at the office, wrote to my MP. I’m going to be evicted, I told them. I have a baby. At the eleventh hour, or eleventh week, my MP stepped in. I escaped eviction, but was drastically behind with my rent. The Housing Benefit went into my bank account, to be swallowed by the negative balance gouged out in late payment charges for the gas, the electricity, the water and so on.

As much as the likes of Lord Freud and Edwina Currie would have you believe that ‘anyone’ can turn up to a foodbank to top up the Ocado delivery with a couple of dented tins of tomatoes and some slightly black bananas, as Kayleigh’s book so clearly shows, the reality is very different.