He was brought up in Cheltenham, and educated at the local Pate's Grammar School, and St John's College, Oxford, where he studied Mandarin Chinese.
[1][2] His father, Francis Chacko, who came to Britain from India at the age of eight, is an actuary,[2][a] while his Lancastrian mother Sarah (née Willcock) is a software engineer who studied for a DPhil at the University of Oxford.
[2] He edited Challenge, the journal of the Young Communist League and was a member of the student union council at Oxford.
[5] "The Star is the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media", said the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn at the time of Chacko's appointment in May 2015.
[1] In summer 2015, he told Josh Glancy of The Sunday Times: "We need a revolution in politics to overturn the power of private ownership... That doesn't mean you'd have people storming Buckingham Palace.