A Life and a Half: The Unexpected Making of a Politician

Before he was a politician, Chris Bryant was an Anglican priest, baptising babies and holding the hands of the dying. Before that, he manned the barricades in Latin America, and before that, he was the scared son of an alcoholic mother and an estranged father.

This is a noholdsbarred account of a Minister’s truly unconventional life – one that has left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay night clubs, on the hustings or the stage.

A Life and a Half tells a story of bishops (sometimes tripping up) and actors, saucy drag queens and pushy candidates, stuffed with moments of joy and hilarity and sorrow and abuse. All while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour.

Whether running into Peter Mandelson in the changing rooms of the Tottenham Court Road Y, performing in the National Youth Theatre or being told that he was gay by his girlfriend, Bryant serves up a politician’s memoir like no other.