Her parents divorced when Toynbee was aged four and she moved to London with her mother, who married the philosopher Richard Wollheim.

Despite pressure from the father's family, and having visited his student sister (mother of the infant Boris Johnson) in Oxford, they decided to separate, and she took illegal abortion-inducing pills.

She has variously attributed this to having an affair with a married TV presenter, to having her first novel published in her first term at Oxford, to the pressure of her scholarship and family expectations, and to taking up with Jeremy Sandford.

Following in the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), in 2003 she published Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain about an experimental period voluntarily living on the minimum wage, which was £4.10 per hour at the time.

Toynbee did badly at school as she was "too rebellious to work, too angry to obey, too impatient to get out of there"; she attributed her gaining an Oxford scholarship to its "heavily class-biased exam" being designed "to reward people of exactly my background".

She and her first husband, Peter Jenkins (from 1970),[8] were supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) breakaway from Labour in 1981, both signing the Limehouse Declaration.

[15] She was one of the few SDP members who believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament, founding an unsuccessful group "Unilateralists for Social Democracy".

[17] In 1995, Toynbee criticised Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Condon's comments that 80% of mugging cases were committed by black people, stating that it was "an over-simplification that is seriously misleading".

[18] She approvingly quoted academic researcher Michael Keith, who said: "If you were to standardise for everything else – education, unemployment, housing estates, life chances – race on its own would have virtually no significance.

[22] During the 2005 General Election, with dissatisfaction high among traditional Labour voters, Toynbee wrote several times about the dangers of protest voting, "Giving Blair a bloody nose".

Reacting to this, Conservative leader David Cameron said he was impressed by one metaphor in her writings – of society being a caravan crossing a desert, where the people at the back can fall so far behind they are no longer part of the tribe.

Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism".

[20] Having advocated for Gordon Brown to succeed Blair as prime minister, Toynbee continued to endorse him in the early part of his premiership.

[25] By spring 2009 she had become sharply critical of Brown, arguing that he had failed to introduce the social-democratic policies he promised, and was very poor at presentation too.

[29] In October 2010, Toynbee was criticised for an article in The Guardian[30] in which she said the government's benefits changes would drive many poor people out of London and could be seen as a "final solution" for their situation.

[33] Toynbee has been described as "the queen of leftist journalists",[11] and in 2008 topped a poll of 100 "opinion makers", carried out by Editorial Intelligence.

[20] With her partner, former Social Affairs editor of The Guardian David Walker (Peter Jenkins died in 1992), Toynbee co-authored two books reviewing the successes and failures of New Labour in power.

[40] In the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, Toynbee wrote that "Political blame spreads right through the Conservative party, with no escape on offer.

This goes far beyond the precise shockers – the Tory MPs who mockingly rejected housing regulation; the cuts to funding to councils responsible for retro-fitting fire suppressants; the disregard of coroner's instructions after the 2009 Lakanal House tragedy; and even the plan to opt out of EU safety regulations.

Toynbee further said that Braverman's "dreams" about Rwanda and cruelty and putting arrivals into squalid conditions in the Manston processing centre disrupted policy.

"[43] Toynbee also criticised Sunak's initial decision to miss the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

[51] In 2011 she accepted an invitation to participate in a debate with the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God but Toynbee later pulled out stating "...this is not my kind of forum".

Look at the 40 bishops' raspberry of an Easter message to Cameron, with their strong rebuke against the "national crisis" of hunger so much worsened by his welfare policies.

The University of Kent awarded Toynbee the honorary title of Doctor of Civil Law in November 2007[56] in recognition of her concern with poverty and welfare.