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. On the one hand, the Labour MP for Ilford North is refusing to fight as a combatant in the late Martin Amis’s war against cliche; in this book, cheeks tend to be rosy red, and working-class matriarchs are always “strong”. You know he must have written it in a great rush, against a harried background of TV appearances, leaflet drops and hospital visits (Streeting is shadow health secretary), and the gallop to the finish shows on the page, particularly when he pads things out with politics. No one wants to read this much about the road to NUS president, not even Wes’s mum.
But on the other hand, it’s also transfixing, albeit in a way I struggle fully to explain. Streeting’s rise from poverty in the East End of London to the Palace of Westminster via Cambridge University is amazingly inspiriting – even now, he’s only 40 – and there’s something so unaffected about the way he describes it, details chosen for no more writerly reason than because he remembers them: the Wall’s coleslaw and He-Man jellies he enjoyed as a treat as a boy; the skate he favoured whenever his grandfather took him down the chippy. He has no discernible self-pity and seems never to judge anyone, not even those who (the reader may think) at times let him down very badly.
