Book review: A Life and a Half: The Unexpected Making of a Politician by Chris Bryant

Lewis Davies

Chris Bryant takes the long view in his partial autobiography, a sort of Pilgrim’s In Progress, work of memoir.

He is an unusual man of many seasons. A Welshman with an English accent, who speaks Spanish with the fluency of a someone whose childhood was spent in parts, in Bilbao and Madrid.

He appears a natural chameleon, primary school in Penarth, Bilbao and Madrid, middle school as a day boarder in a Scottish public school, sixth form in Cheltenham before Oxford and the priesthood, all before he’s thirty.

And then he throws that all up, in part due to the inherent conflict of being a gay man in an institution that at the time refused to accept anything but uncomplicated heterosexual relationships for their employees even though it was patently obvious that a significant percentage of their clergy were living relatively openly as gay men and women.

Bryant couldn’t have put up with this for long. He finally tenders his resignation to the bishop of Northamptonshire. Chris describes the bishop as a bit of an old fraud who has already blocked him standing for Labour in county council elections while other clergy sit smugly as Conservative councillors.

The bishop though is sad to lose him.

“…my final meeting with the bishop took the biscuit, as he squeezed my hand with his squidgy, fat fingers and told me, ‘There’s no need to leave. If only you knew how to bide your time, Christopher, and keep your mouth shut, you could become a bishop and enjoy everything I have today, including regular dinners with Mrs Thatcher.’… I hadn’t realised that was what Christianity was all about.”

It was time to move on again.

Family disintegration

He is good at this. A naturally tough survivor with a childhood and adolescence blighted by family disintegration that would have damaged many, is navigated with determination.

He gets involved, acts with the National Youth Theatre, works hard to get a place at an Oxford college.

He claims he felt he never really fitted in while everyone else seemed to think he did. He is a decent athlete, competing in swimming galas and cross-country runs while at school and has assiduously kept himself fit with gym sessions well into his sixties.

He claims to have been useless at team sports only making the cricket team as a scorer. I suspect he just didn’t enjoy the absorption of self in team environments.

But he does notice that to make things work in politics you’ve got to work with others. He is battle scarred and wary from five years as a councillor in Hackney Borough Council where the main political battles were with members of his own party.

The best chapter is his adoption by the Rhondda Labour party. He was a bold choice at the time. It is an emotional story. There was a lot made of Bryant being a gay man. He tackles it straight. It is not in his nature to hide.

Looking back now Wales has improved, become more tolerant, open. 2001 was another country. It was still a decade before Gareth Thomas, amid widespread speculation, confirmed that he was gay.

Thomas had endured abuse and innuendo for years. On Bryant’s selection there was a lot of coded reference to him being ‘exotic’ for the Rhondda. The Western Mail ran an article by Nick Speed with the headline ‘Gay, from out of the area and briefly a Tory – what will the Valleys’ voters make of it?’

Ten years later Speed was marrying his partner in a civil partnership. Wales Online ran the headline “Cardiff Councillor Rodney Berman and his gay partner, a political journalist, are to tie the knot… several years after meeting at a Liberal Democrat conference.” It was all fair in love and politics.

‘Strength of character’

At the selection meeting Bryant opens up to the room…

“I know some of you have been rung and told certain things about me. I know why, but I want to be very open with you. I am a gay man, and I live with my partner. I was taught not to judge someone according to the colour of their skin, the accent they speak with, their gender or creed, but according to their ability and the strength of their character. I hope you will do the same today, because I don’t want to be the gay candidate, I want to be the Labour candidate for the Rhondda.”

He won the nomination. The Rhondda had had enough of stereotypes.

The realities of electioneering have often disappointed Bryant. Leanne Wood stood against him for Plaid in the Rhondda. He thought they could have been friends in other circumstances, his politics apart from independence align closely with Woods but:

“She was clearly offended by the very idea of me – and the campaign was quite vicious… Plaid’s canvassers happily told voters I was Tory, I was English, I had been parachuted in by Tony Blair, and (despite Plaid’s support for gay equality) that I was gay.”

A later platonic encounter with the prospective Plaid candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Adam Price in Cardiff’s gay bar, Club X, gives Bryant some hope he’s making progress. He approaches Price in parliament after the election suggesting they make a joint appearance at Cardiff Pride that summer as the two gay Welsh MPs. Price panics, fears he is about to be “outed” and reports Bryant to the Plaid whip. “I had completely misread the whole situation.”

It is the appearance and openness of people like Bryant in politics, or Jess Fishlock and Gareth Thomas in international sport, that has allowed Wales to move on from the widespread homophobia of earlier times. The past is another country, thankfully.

Bryant has been a man on a mission. He may be able to resist everything but a challenge and this offer to tell his own story from his publisher probably sounded a good idea at the time with retirement looming. But Bryant is back in government after a long and increasingly visible time in opposition.

Bored

Bryant does say he gets bored easily and moves onto something else and I think there may be something of this in A Life and a Half. The story of his childhood and early ecclesiastical career is well-told, absorbing and revealing.

The middle years are more lightly drawn. He is a successfully published historian with biographies of Stafford Crips and Glenda Jackson along with his constituency work. He’s worked effectively for the BBC in Brussels and has been active for many notable causes, has run marathons, as well as holidaying regularly in well-known resorts with active Gay scenes such as Mykonos and Sitges. He’s not shy.

I’m not sure where’s he’s managed to find all the time. He is not afraid to be honest as a person who has tried to make the most of life and his considerable talents for language, conversation and friendship. He places and explains much of his outlook on life through the Spanish-Arabic word ¡Ojalá! “It embodies hope and desire for something better, fairer and more beautiful.”

He’s currently the Minister for Trade in the Labour Government and has wisely decided at this stage to write only about the start of his parliamentary career with light vignettes of the last twenty thrown in. We get very little on what he feels he does in his constituency role or his long years in on the Opposition benches. He’s been the MP for the Rhondda since 2001.

The book seems unfinished, which is where Bryant’s career is. There’ll be another chapter, another book, another half.

A Life and a Half: The Unexpected Making of a Politician is published by Bloomsbury and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops

This extract is part of an exclusive review by Lewis Davies in the New Welsh Review: writing about the literature and culture of Wales since 1988