Sir Chris Bryant

Before he was a politician, Sir Chris Bryant MP 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. Chris is ‘equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay clubs, on the hustings or the stage’. Chris will recount growing up in General Franco’s Spain, acting alongside some of the most talented names of the day as a teenager, and caring for his brother and mother as she descended into addiction. He ran the family home from sixteen, became ordained at twenty-four and came out as gay shortly after. And that’s just the early years… All while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour.