A LIFE AND A HALF: THE UNEXPECTED MAKING OF A POLITICIAN by Chris Bryant: I inherited a fortune and gave it all away...

FROM repressed Anglican priest to liberated Labour MP, via the throbbing gay nightclubs of 1990s London: it’s been quite a journey for 63-year-old Business Minister Sir Chris Bryant.

When he first stood as Labour candidate for Rhondda in 2000, the journalist Tom Baldwin wrote: ‘It would be difficult to find a Labour candidate less in keeping with the traditional image of Rhondda.’ Bryant’s rivals in Plaid Cymru tried to smear him with his past: privately educated, formerly a Tory, ‘parachuted in’ by Tony Blair – and gay.

But with charm and persistence, he managed to win the confidence of voters in the Welsh valleys. ‘Colourful Past No Bar to MP Chris,’ said the South Wales Echo, after he’d won the seat with a 16,000 majority in the 2001 General Election. His ‘call’ to become a Labour politician was the second great one of his life. The first – to be ordained – arrived while he was on tour with the National Youth Theatre in 1981 in his first Oxford University summer vacation.

In Antwerp Cathedral, he felt ‘called’ to the priesthood. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he writes in his wonderfully frank and honest memoir (which takes us up to that moment when was first elected as MP). ‘I didn’t suddenly get pious. Nor did I intend to join a monastery. In fact, that evening I went to bed with a member of the cast.’

He’d been aware of his homosexuality since prep-school days at Hurst Grange near Stirling, when the boys in his dorm decided to give each other a ‘massage’ to soothe their muscles on the eve of a rugby match. When one boy asked Christopher to straddle him to do the massage, ‘I felt him brush against me. And I felt shame. Terrible shame.’

That shame would stalk him through his teens, in those days of Are You Being Served?, and Kenneth Williams’ camp persona, when it was still acceptable to jeer at someone for being a ‘limp-wristed, effeminate, lisping poof’. Bryant tried to have girlfriends to hide the truth from the world and from himself. One, Donna (still a close friend), simply said in bed one morning: ‘Christopher, you do know you’re gay, don’t you?’ ‘There was no rancour,’ he writes. ‘It was just a fact.’

AT the time, the Church of England was (and still is) contorted in its attitude towards its own gay clergy. At the selection conference for ordination, a male panellist asked him: ‘Do you have a girlfriend, Christopher?’ To which he replied: ‘Are you propositioning me?’ Bryant feels the panel should have followed up on that, seeing as homosexuality among clergy was officially a sin. ‘But the Church was a sensitive soul back then,’ and ‘preferred to draw a veil over such matters’.

He got through the selection process and entered that strange Anglican world, full of secretly gay priests living in constant fear of exposure. At one interview with a bishop, Bryant found himself ‘racing round the grand piano in the living room, trying to escape the bishop’s clutches’. Inner-city dioceses were so full of gay clergy, he writes, that ‘the induction of a vicar in some parishes was not that different from a Saturday night in Soho, except that the ecclesiastical outfits were more flamboyant but less flammable’.

Bryant’s childhood was marred both by that conflicted attitude to his own sexuality, and by having an alcoholic mother. ‘Christopher, I drink too much,’ she admitted to him when he was just 14. From that day on, he took on the household chores, as well as the impossible task of trying to stop her from drinking. She swayed in the kitchen and stumbled in blind drunk to the school play he was in. His father moved out, and disappeared almost entirely from Christopher’s life. His mother cracked her head open on the kitchen floor when Christopher’s four-year-old younger brother was alone in the house with her. One of the most moving things about this memoir is Bryant’s mixture of rage at his mother for putting her sons through this – and torturous guilt that he didn’t do enough to help her.

SUCH experiences certainly imbued him with empathy, both as a priest and later as a Labour MP. I must say, it stuck in my throat that Bryant benefited from a brilliant education at two private schools (he won a scholarship to Cheltenham College), and schoolmasters such as Tim Pearce, who prepared him for Oxbridge.

Our government’s slapping of VAT on private education is making it near impossible for the middle classes to afford what he was given. He writes about his three wonderful, elderly spinster cousins, who were like grandparents to him, having him stay in their affluent, ordered household, which he adored, with a gong ringing for dinner.

When Jean, the last of them, was dying, she asked him if she could leave Bryant their entire multimillion-pound estate. His uncle was furious that his own children would not inherit anything. Bryant decided it was wrong for him to take it as a clergyman, but asked for just enough to look after his mother. He also gave each of his cousins hefty sums from the estate. The rest went to charity. He emerged from school ‘a proper little Tory’.

A few things swayed him towards Labour: an increasing loathing of ‘Thatcher’, as he calls her; visiting Argentina and seeing the iniquities of a far-Right government; seeing shocking levels of poverty in a Newcastle suburb; and watching Les Miserables in the West End.

When he decided to leave the priesthood in order to live a full life as a gay man and (he hoped) a Labour MP, the then ‘Bishop of Peterborough squeezed my hand with his squidgy fat fingers and said: “There’s no need to leave. If only you knew how to bide your time and keep your mouth shut, you could become a bishop and enjoy everything I have today, including regular dinners with Mrs Thatcher.” ’

There was nothing he’d rather do less. Released, he launched himself into the liberated world of 1990s London’s gay clubs. ‘Black, white, tall, short, old and young, it was all mixed up in a glorious medley of rampaging naughtiness.’

He met his lifelong partner, Jared, at a club called The Yard, when canvassing in LGBT bars with LGBT Labour.

His thoughts on the state of Britain seem to epitomise his own life, ‘Our future is not yet written for us. Nor is the future of our country and the world. We can shape it anew. We can change course.’