Baroness Jenkin’s apology for her crass comment that hunger is partly caused by poor people’s inability to cook is unconvincing.

Her attempt to reach into a past when “previous generations” had cooking skills rather than opting for “pre-prepared food” is no less problematic.

It smacks of a determination to find an excuse to blame poor people — at least partially — for the predicament in which they find themselves.

The baroness’s patronising comments revive memories of the hardships endured by working people during the first world war when, as William Gallacher recalled in his Revolt on the Clyde, well-heeled “ladies” would visit poor areas of Glasgow to instruct their working-class counterparts about the joyous properties of cod’s head soup.

On seeking questions, they were stunned into silence by the future Communist MP’s enquiry as to who had the rest of the fish.

Many people still prepare good nutritious meals from scratch, but there has been a trend in recent decades towards convenience foods because of the difficulty of juggling full-time paid employment with time spent on travel to work and other household responsibilities.

It is inevitable, given the relentless tide of advertising for convenience foods, that skills have been lost.

However, that is not the reason — or even a major cause — for growing numbers of people having to resort to foodbanks.

The basic reason is the intensification and extension of real, gut-wrenching poverty experienced by working-class people.

Hardship is not restricted to the unemployed, although claimants frequently find that late payment of benefits pushes them into acute difficulty.

Low-paid workers are increasingly driven to ask for supplies from foodbanks despite claiming in-work assistance such as housing benefit and tax credits.

Only a bile-ridden nasty piece of work such as Norman Tebbit could play down the humiliation that recourse to this form of charity inspires.

In his sneer-filled universe, “there is always a near-infinite demand for valuable goods that are given away free.” He also suggested that people approaching foodbanks were spending their wages and benefits on junk food first.

Tebbit, a “semi-house-trained polecat,” as former Labour leader Michael Foot called him, takes it upon himself to spew out the insults that other Tories prefer to think but keep to themselves.

But they share a contempt for the working class, especially for that section going through the most difficult times at present because of the coalition government’s austerity agenda.

The Westminster elite has no concept of how growing numbers of their fellow citizens cope with being forced to the margins of society.

Baroness Jenkin boasts of having eaten “a large bowl of porridge today. It cost 4p. A large bowl of sugary cereal will cost 25p.”

She doesn’t mention her own privileged background or her husband’s overclaiming of parliamentary expenses, for which he was ordered to repay over £36,000.

People for whom money is no problem have enormous scope to congratulate themselves on their healthy and parsimonious lifestyle.

When every day is a struggle for survival, the options are less straightforward.

Poverty assails more working people because society’s feather-bedded minority is cornering too much of the nation’s wealth.

Foodbanks could become a distant memory like the workhouse or the 1930s “training camps,” but only when a living wage, rent control, public housebuildling, better welfare provisions and a fairer tax system redress the lop-sided division of society’s wealth in favour of the idle rich.