We are very excited to be hosting an evening with Labour MP and the Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him. In One Boy, Two Bills and A Fry Up he vividly portrays the power of family and education to help him transform his life.
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. He will be in conversation with Professor Pam Cox.
Tickets can be booked via the Essex Book Festival website.
An inspiring, witty East End growing up memoir by leading Labour MP Wes Streeting, vividly portraying the power of family and education to help him escape poverty and transform his life.
Wes Streeting 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 and A Fry Up he brings to life the poverty, humiliation and incredible struggle for them choosing whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, put carpet on the floor, or food on the table.
Wes Streeting 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 in childhood to eventually come out, and to go on and face his now successful struggle with kidney cancer.
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.
Wes Streeting is a Labour MP and the Shadow Health Secretary. He read History at Selwyn College, Cambridge and began his political vocation as President of the National Union of Students. Afterwards he became Head of Education at Stonewall and served in local government, before being elected as an MP in 2015.
