Wes Streeting: One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up

Wes Streeting MP, Shadow Health Secretary, might have ended up in prison rather than in Parliament. His maternal grandfather, Bill, an unsuccessful armed robber, spent time behind bars, as did his grandmother, who was also a political campaigner.

Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him. In One Boy, Two Bills & A Fry Up he brings to life the poverty, humiliation and incredible struggle of having to choose whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, or put food on the table.

He knows it was the help and inspiration he received from the great characters that surrounded him, especially his paternal grandfather (also called Bill), that ultimately set him on the way to Cambridge and then Parliament. He knew he could draw on the strengths developed in childhood to eventually come out, and to go on…