“We're at that stage before the book comes out, where I'm now beginning to wonder if it was actually such a good idea.”
Wes Streeting is sitting in the Mirror’s newsroom, talking about his new memoir, One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up - and looks genuinely nervous about how it will be received.
“I’m in that stage of like, near terror,” he says. “Not just because of the usual thing that authors would go through of being nervous about things like reviews, or how well the book does - it's because it is such a personal story.
“And not just mine, I think when people read it, they will see that this is very much about my parents and grandparents, their childhood, their lives, their upbringing, and when I was writing the book, I felt this enormous pressure and weight of responsibility to make sure that I took care in telling those stories, making sure they're accurate, making sure that I kind of paint the characters in a way that's true to them and true to life.”
The searingly honest book charts his journey from the East End to Cambridge University and Westminster.
And it tells the story of how his character and politics were shaped by family members - each of their extraordinary characters described vividly and warmly.
Streeting’s story is often reduced to “single mum, grew up in a council house” - overlooking, for one thing, that he lived with his father for years as a teenager.
But also left out of that reduction are the capital-A activism of his grandmother, whose political talents were stymied by having served time in prison.
Then there’s the two Bills of the title - first Bill Crowley, a habitual criminal who spent most of Streeting’s childhood in prison.
“I sometimes get bemused by the way in which sort of family connections, my family connections, in particular get written up in terms of, "oh, his granddad knew the Krays," Streeting says.
"And I sort of roll my eyes a bit, partly because he did know the Krays, but they weren't particularly close. That and actually there was a cast of other gangsters that he was in with, who you can read about in the book."
On the other hand, his other Grandfather, Bill Streeting, was a hard-working civil engineer who served in the Royal Navy in World War II, and was a traditional Thatcher-era working class Tory.
Streeting says the book isn’t an “ideological tract.”
He says: “It's not my kind of vision for Britain. But you can, I think you can tell through the book where my politics come from, and where my values come from.”
The book’s introduction recounts how doctors broke the news to Streeting over the phone, sitting in his car while campaigning in Bury.
It’s a darkly funny anecdote, that ends in Streeting thanking the doctor for delivering a “sh*t sandwich” of news - that he had cancer, but wasn’t going to die - very well.
Streeting tells the Mirror he is now all clear, and felt he’d been “lucky.”
“It's a funny thing to say, when you've had a cancer diagnosis in your 30s,” he says.
“I just genuinely felt lucky. Really felt so lucky. I thought this could have been so different.”
He pauses for a moment, catching his breath.
"And cancer stories are so - I'm welling up now - other cancer stories hit me differently now,” he says.
“I find it very hard to read about cancer stories, to talk about cancer stories. It hits me much more personally. Partly because, you know, I know people who have or are currently going through it and their outlook is so different to mine.
“And there's a real unfairness and injustice about it. And, you know, why is it mine was caught early and I've got to have hopefully a really great, long life?
“And why is it someone else had a diagnosis that was caught too late? There is an unfairness and injustice around cancer. It affects one in two of us.
“I lost one of my grandparents to lung cancer, it's one of the worst things that's happened in my life. So, you know, those stories kind of really hit me differently now."
Since getting the all-clear, he’s joined a gym and got a trainer - trying to work out at least once a week.
And made some changes to his diet, cutting down on fizzy drinks and salt to avoid risks like diabetes and kidney disease, which would now be life-threatening.
But he hasn’t really slowed down. He’s been promoted twice since his operation - first to a shadow cabinet child poverty brief, and then to Shadow Health Secretary.
“I am a workaholic,” he admits. “I think the one of the things that I found reassuring was that it it made me think I'm really happy with what I'm doing and how I'm spending my life like I I have such a passion for what I do.
“And it is a six or seven day a week job most weeks. And I don't I didn't come back resenting that in fact, I came back determined to work even harder.
“And I think people I work closely with in parliament will probably notice, kind of when I came back, it was like all guns blazing.”
Streeting has been broadly positive about his experience of NHS cancer treatment - despite a few grumpy tweets about hiccups in the process.
"The poor nurses at Queen's Hospital in Romford,” he says.
“I when I went in after tweeting once...I don't write grumpy points of view letters. No, I just tweet and go "Oh, I can't believe it was on my way to hospital and my scan results aren't there".
“And then I went into hospital and one of the nurses, when they didn't have the scan results, she's like, "Oh, you're not going tweet about this, are you? Because we were doing our best. And when you tweeted before, we were really upset."
“And I said "Look, whatever my frustrations, they are never with the people working in the NHS. I know it's not their fault."
With Rishi Sunak still stubbornly refusing to call an election, Streeting has lately taken to the unorthodox strategy of openly challenging the Tories to steal his ideas.
"I do think things are getting worse, not better. And that really worries me... What frightens me at the moment is I can't see any semblance of a real plan to turn the ship around from the government. Ideally, I wish they'd nick some of ours. We've got a workforce plan that would double the number of medical school places and recruit more nurses and midwives. It's fully costed, fully funded. Nick it. Take it.
“Even if Rishi doesn't want to scrap the non-dom tax status because he'll get grief at home, well, find a different way of funding it. I don't care but do it. Like, get on with it.
“I’d say to those Conservatives that are counting down the days the election thinking "It's probably all over for us", at least do something good with your final days in office.”
Streeting also writes in detail for the first time about his experience of coming out in his 20s - first to University friends and later to his parents.
He describes how his father found an invitation to then-Labour MP Steven Timms’ civil partnership ceremony, addressed to Wes and his boyfriend at the time - and he “put two and two together and made four.”
Streeting says: “He had all sorts of questions. You know, 'why didn't you tell me?' And lots of fears. Like, what's your life gonna be like, now? Are you going to have a harder life through discrimination?
“Thinking about when my dad was growing up, I was born in the 80s, and there was real anxiety about things like HIV and whether I'd be more vulnerable to him as a gay man. And those were reasonable things to ask and to be worried about. I was very lucky."
Wes says his Dad - with whom he lived for several years growing up - had been “mortified” to learn that among the reasons he didn’t tell him sooner, was that he remembered him saying things that were “kind of homophobic in passing.”
“Usually kind of casual jokes,” Streeting says.
“And what was interesting to me is he had no recollection of it and was mortified. And my dad is not remotely homophobic.
“But he is of a generation that has grown up in a time when it was illegal to be gay in this country.
“And I just thought, I can't remember when I sort of first thought I might be gay but by the time I came out to my friends at university, I was 20.
“If it took me 20 years to understand and accept who I was, and be able to tell other people, I think I can give my dad a few days to process the information and kind of come to terms with it. And he's been brilliant and supportive and all my family have."
Streeting recounts having experienced homophobia early in his political career - when Labour team members in his Ilford North seat privately questioned whether the “very religious” community would accept a Labour MP.
“And the delicious irony of that is that not only did Ilford North elected gay MP in 2015, we bucked the trend in doing so,” he says.
But he doesn’t recall facing homophobia since becoming an MP - and says the string of scandals about MPs behaviour, from ‘pestminster’ to bullying, aren’t representative of what Parliament is really like to work in.
He says: “I mean, there are certainly some of my parliamentary colleagues, particularly the Conservative Party with atrocious voting records on gay equality, and who will say things in the course of some of their parliamentary contributions, which I think are intemperate, unwise, or downright offensive.
“But I've never had it directed at me. ...I actually think in the vast majority of cases, Parliament is full of lovely people.”
He says he wants to encourage more working class people to aspire to careers in politics - but worries that endless scandals would put them off.
“How are we going to encourage more young women to think about careers in politics if they're picking up the papers and reading that there are nasty blokes who are sex pests hanging around in Parliament?
“How are we going to encourage more people from working class and underrepresented backgrounds to come and work in Parliament if they think it's kind of stuffed full of people whose attitudes to employment and hierarchy like something from a Dickens novel?
“That is not representative of what what is what parliament is like, I feel very comfortable being a gay man in Parliament, actually."
One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up: A Memoir of Growing Up and Getting On by Wes Streeting, to be published on 29th June by Hodder & Stoughton.
Read extracts from One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up, starting exclusively here.
Coming tomorrow: Wes on coming out as gay, starting out in politics, and his shocking cancer diagnosis.
