Chris Bryant: A Life and a Half
Delve into the bracingly honest story of the Labour Minister’s unorthodox path to politics (via priesthood), with chair Shahidha Bari.
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 no-holds-barred 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 20th-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.
Chris Bryant is an acclaimed historian of Parliament and a Sunday Times bestselling author. He has been the MP for Rhondda and Ogmore since 2001 and is currently Minister of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Bryant was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster.
He is the author of several previous books, including Code of Conduct, which was a number two Sunday Times bestseller, and The Glamour Boys, winner of the 2020 Parliamentary Book Award for Best Non-Fiction.
Chair Shahidha Bari is an academic, critic and broadcaster. She is a professor at the University of the Arts London, a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Free Thinking and Start the Week. She’s the author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (2019) and Look Again: Fashion (2021) for Tate Britain.
Need to know
For your visit
This event is held at the Purcell Room Southbank Centre
The Purcell Room is located in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is open from 90 minutes before events start until they finish. It’s closed at all other times.
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