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

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Your dad has put two and two together and I think he’s made four.” My secret was out now. I could do nothing but wait anxiously for dad to come home from work. Coming out in Cambridge felt liberating. Coming out at home felt terrifying. Wearmouth, Rachel (17 July 2019). "Jeremy Corbyn-Led Labour Party 'Destined To Lose General Election', MPs Claim". Huffpost . Retrieved 28 July 2019. He dated girls for a while because “it made my life easier” though they never had sex. Finally, at Cambridge, where he studied history, he came out. “I reached a tipping point. I thought, I cannot go on pretending to be something I’m not. When I first came out, I felt total liberation. This huge weight had been lifted. It was only then I had a true appreciation of how exhausting and time-consuming it is trying to be someone you’re not.” APPG on British Jews". Board of Deputies of British Jews. Archived from the original on 2 September 2019 . Retrieved 2 September 2019.

Until the 2019 general election, Streeting was a member of the Treasury Select Committee. [56] After the election of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party, Streeting was appointed Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. On 16 October 2020, Streeting became Shadow Minister for Schools in succession to Margaret Greenwood, who had resigned the previous day following her opposition to the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. Abena Oppong-Asare replaced Streeting as Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury. In the May 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle, Streeting was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Child Poverty. [57] He was promoted to the post of Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the November 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle. [58] His mum, Corrina, was just 18 when she fell pregnant with Wes and was under pressure from her family to have a termination. Streeting, Wes; Siddiq, Tulip (24 April 2017). "We've heard your anxieties loud and clear". The Jewish Chronicle . Retrieved 24 April 2017. Why am I the last to know? Why did you think I wouldn’t accept you? Are you happy?” The worries Dad had were ones shared by lots of parents. Would my life be harder being gay?

Rodgers, Sienna (14 May 2021). "Reshuffle: Keir Starmer's new Labour frontbench in full". LabourList . Retrieved 25 February 2022.

You couldn’t pay me to do what Keir has done in the last three years’: with the Labour leader in April. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PAEditorial consultant Tom Perrin and publisher Rowena Webb acquired world all language rights through Laura Macdougall at United Agents, for publication in 2023. How much would Streeting like to lead the Labour party? “Hehehehehe!” That laugh again. “You couldn’t pay me to do what Keir has done in the last three years.” I don’t believe you, I say. “Put it this way, if I’d been leader of the party after 2019, I don’t think I would have been anywhere near as successful as Keir has been.”

And yet, there’s something missing here, which is where the fascination comes in. How did he make it, you wonder, absorbing the more chaotic details. What calmness and determination he had; what self-containment and aspiration. But if the reader cannot quite account for these things – where did they come from? – nor does Streeting, who writes as if he’s a stranger to himself. 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. The third possibility – that he’s some kind of saint – seems unlikely given his attraction to the knot of vipers that is party politics. At Cambridge, unlike many of his fellow students, he has to work at Comet in the holidaysIn the days and weeks that followed, I focused on my recovery. I realised that it was the first time I had stopped to rest since I graduated almost 20 years before.

Wes made great strides politically as a student eventually becoming NUS President, then a councillor, then a deputy council leader before becoming an MP. At every stage friends he had made helped with greater and greater campaigns. His jobs stretched his abilities en route and he became used to moving things on and being an advocate for others. Cooke, Rachel (27 June 2023). "One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up by Wes Streeting review – memoir by a man on the move". The Observer . Retrieved 10 August 2023. Labour selects candidate to stand in new Teesside seat at next general election". The Northern Echo. 4 October 2023 . Retrieved 4 October 2023. In the 2015 UK general election, Streeting was elected as the Labour Party Member of Parliament for Ilford North. He overturned a Conservative majority of 5,404, winning by 589 votes. [32] After being elected to Parliament, Streeting was elected Honorary President of the British Youth Council. [33] He is also a Vice President of the Local Government Association and a Patron of LGBT Labour. We walk across the road to another estate – greener, slightly more spacious. This is where Streeting spent most of his childhood. For his mother, it was an upgrade, but he found it gloomy and threatening. Did he play with the other kids here? “I wasn’t allowed to play out. My mum didn’t think the kids on the estate were a good influence.” Did it make him feel alienated? “Yeah. But she was probably right. It wasn’t safe. I was conscious when I started secondary school that some of those kids who were a bit older than me got into smoking and hanging out with people who were drug dealers on the estate.” At weekends, he stayed with his father in Dagenham. Both his parents went on to have children with new partners. He has five brothers, a sister and step-sister.General Election Results". Redbridge Council. Archived from the original on 22 May 2015 . Retrieved 20 May 2015.