Olympic great Mo Farah won praise from across Britain’s political spectrum on Tuesday after the shock revelation that he was illegally trafficked as a child to the country and forced to work in domestic servitude.

The 39-year-old distance runner, one of Britain’s best-loved and most successful athletes, told a BBC documentary that his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin. Rather than moving to the UK as a refugee from Somalia with his parents as previously claimed, Farah said he came from Djibouti aged eight or nine with a woman he had never met, was given a false identity, and then made to look after another family’s children.