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

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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. 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”). This riveting tale of social aspiration leads us from the East End to Westminster in detailed honesty.

Afterwards he became Head of Education at Stonewall and served in local government, before being elected as an MP in 2015.A career in student politics leads to a job at Stonewall, and thence to his election, first as a Labour councillor and finally as an MP. 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”. 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”.

Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. 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.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’s “working-class hero” performance might be more convincing if it didn’t read like an election flyer. Alan Johnson'This riveting tale of social aspiration leads us from the East End to Westminster in detailed honesty. 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. 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. Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him.

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. 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. 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. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.