One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up: A Memoir of Growing Up and Getting On

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In 'One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up' he brings to life the poverty, humiliation, and incredible struggle for them choosing whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, put carpet on the floor, or food on the table. His concern for their suffering, and his admiration and gratitude for their hard graft – his mother works as a silver service waitress, and his father, variously, as a pub landlord, a minicab driver and a car salesman – is exemplary. Almost two-thirds of this book is committed to Streeting’s early years in a loving if chaotic family.

Streeting’s memoir is a clear sign that he’s parking his tanks on the Labour leader’s lawn: we’re even given some anecdotes about Arsenal shirts and carrying around Tony Blair literature. Kidney cancer is most common in people over 60 and its severity depends on where it is, how big it is, if it has spread, and your general health.Thanks to cowardice within Labour, the Lib Dems, the NUS and apparatchiks like him, working-class students such as my little brother are paying a lifetime of debt for their university education. Streeting was diagnosed at the age of 38 in May 2021, and just two months later, he was declared cancer-free after the removal of one of his kidneys. If the transience that comes of several broken homes is hard, the cause of insecurity and too-long tube journeys, it’s even more agonising to watch a parent’s emotional life unravel – though Streeting never says so (I’m surmising, having been there myself). Streeting is the essence of the Labour Party’s new makeover; a politician with a refreshingly “relatable” background who also knows on which side his chip butty is buttered.

Though he wears his Arsenal shirt to school on non-uniform days in the hope of warding off bullies, he also brandishes a copy of Tony Blair’s New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country on the coach to games lessons. After several nice chapters about doing well at school, becoming involved in drama and eventually realising his destiny as a Labour politician, Streeting gets to the bit of his life in which thirtysomethings such as me are most interested: his time at the NUS.He read History at Selwyn College, Cambridge and began his political vocation as President of the National Union of Students. The grandfather in question is one of the two Bills of the book’s title – the other is Streeting’s altogether more upright paternal grandfather, from whom he inherited his Christian faith – and he was a bad lot; Streeting’s mother was born in prison, his grandmother then in the middle of a stretch for having been an accessory to one of her husband’s crimes. This makes Streeting’s bleating here that student politics was about “organising collectively to make a real, practical difference” stick in the craw. Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him.

A Memoir of Growing Up and Getting On A moving and inspiring hymn to the ups and downs of life - to love, to adversity and above all courage. The MP for Ilford North may try to assert that he isn’t yet another “terrible careerist” politician, and his book might fool Labour’s newly focused cohort of upper-middle-class liberals. Despite detailing how poverty had driven his family to criminality, apologising to an almost uncomfortable degree for every detail he gives of his grandparents’ lives, his conclusion is that “hard work matters… people on the Left of politics don’t appreciate this enough”.His clarity at this point was almost as amazing to me as the fact that his maternal grandfather used to wear a particularly grotesque rubber mask during the armed robberies he carried out. He may, unlike many of his fellow students, have to work at Comet in the holidays, but he’s on his way (at Cambridge, he’s also able to come out).

Hearing Loop: Essex Book Festival has a mobile Roger Pen hearing loop system, which needs to be booked by individuals in advance at least five days before the event. Wes Streeting joined The Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose to talk about the importance of state education and his new book.

I mean, that's how bad politics has fallen by the way, even armed robbers look down their noses at us. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer Wes Streeting outside Fullwell Cross library in Ilford, January 2022. But then their subsequent relationships fracture, too, and your heart breaks for their son, who’s so accommodating, so ready to accept and even to love every potential step-parent; so sweetly devoted to his baby half-siblings. A moving and inspiring hymn to the ups and downs of life - to love, to adversity and above all courage. I took a shine to this Bill’s mother, Nanny Knott (Streeting’s great granny), who kept a menagerie in her council flat that included several mynah birds.