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

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This honest, uplifting, affectionate memoir is a tribute to the love and support which set him on his way out of poverty, and informs everything about Wes Streeting's mission now in politics. That had a transformational impact on my life because certainly when I was growing up, there was no one in the family I could look to as a role model of having gone to university, I was the first to go.

Wes Streeting’s memoir, the cumbersomely titled One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up , pulls off the very rare trick of being both a little bit boring and unexpectedly fascinating. 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.Alternatively, a memoir might live or die on the basis of the politics of its subject: you’re interested in their early years, schooldays and memories of their father for what you’ll learn about their views today. Although he's no longer with us and didn't live to see me elected to Parliament, I can almost hear him in my head saying, 'Yeah, but you work with more crooks than I did in Parliament',” he joked. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.

The problem is, Streeting invites us to enjoy his remembrances of East End tumult – complete with armed robbery and theft – only to close down the fun with a wagging finger (at one point quipping that he’d always found the “glamorisation” of the Krays to be “baffling and unedifying”). By comparing the titular Bills, not pieces of legislation but Wes’s two grandfathers – one a law-abiding Conservative voter, and one a jailbird – we’re given a window into two approaches often found in working-class families in the 1980s. Neither will it shock the reader to find out that what is billed as a personal reflection on how a working-class lad made his way to Westminster comes across as a carefully considered piece of political manoeuvring. 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.

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. But against all odds, with the help of his inspiring role models and state education, Streeting secured a place at the University of Cambridge and went on to become the Member of Parliament for Ilford North in 2015.

Either the inward is simply not available to him – some people, a touch robotic, are like this – or (more likely) there are feelings he still finds so painful, he can only push them away. But I can’t see this book, and especially the way he has written it, as anything other than a statement of intent. The third possibility – that he’s some kind of saint – seems unlikely given his attraction to the knot of vipers that is party politics.Ian McKellen 'A moving and inspiring hymn to the ups and downs of life - to love, to adversity and above all courage.

His mum and dad were teenagers when he was born, and their relationship cannot survive the strain of playing grownups.

As we marched on Parliament, protesting against the fees hike, many of us knew it was futile – thanks, in part, to the decision by Streeting and the NUS to drop its campaign for free education in 2008. A moving and inspiring hymn to the ups and downs of life - to love, to adversity and above all courage. Speaking to Graham Norton about his memoir, the 40-year-old reflected: “Without a great state education, I always joke I might have ended up in prison like my granddad rather than Parliament. Not only does he understand the kind of voters whose support his party badly needs, he is clearly ruthless, able to keep his head when all those around him are losing theirs.