Chris Bryant: 'I've got a terrible confession'

New Statesman​

3 days ago

Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck
'I've got a terrible confession,' Chris Bryant tells me over lunch. He leans forward, intense and conspiratorial, and whispers, 'It's to do with the Pet Shop Boys.'
As confessions go, this one – an embarrassing failure to recognise lead singer Neil Tennant at some event, despite the band's hit song 'It's a Sin' once feeling like Bryant's private anthem – barely meets the definition. But the word seems apt, somehow, for our conversation – and for the tangle of concealment and self-confidence that have defined Bryant's political life.
The 62-year-old minister for the creative industries, arts, tourism, data protection and telecoms has just published a book full of confessions. A Life and A Half: The Unexpected Making of a Politician is a memoir, not of his time in politics as the Labour MP for Rhondda in South Wales, but of everything that came before. His childhood, partially spent Franco's Spain, and dominated by a distant working-class father and an erratic, alcoholic mother. His struggles with his sexuality (it was Bryant's girlfriend in his twenties who told him he was gay; he married his husband Jared in 2010 in the first civil partnership ceremony to be held in parliament) and how the shame of being a gay man in the Eighties and Nineties shaped him; his time as an Anglican priest, grappling with the Church of England's tortured stance on homosexuality and with his own shifting faith. And his experience of being sexually assaulted by Michael Croft, the founder of the National Youth Theatre – a story he has kept secret for 46 years.
'None of my friends know that story. I'm a bit frightened of how they will react to it,' he tells me, adding that he hopes maybe going public will be helpful to others who experienced similar at the hands of the theatre legend. Croft died in 1986, and Bryant – newly ordained – conducted his funeral. The contradictory emotions around a multi-decade friendship that persevered despite a horrific abuse of power are hard to untangle.
Four decades later, Bryant found himself chairing the Commons committee on standards, crusading against sexual harassment in parliament and attempting to tackle bad behaviour among MPs. 'All of which I always thought was very ironic, because I don't think of myself as a very judgemental person.' He switches from a sombre tone to one of exaggerated campness. 'I mean I might say, 'Oooh I wouldn't have worn that shirt.'' He glances at my shirt and pretends to be horrified of causing offence. 'I'm not saying that to you, sorry!'
This is the rhythm as our lunch at the Garden Museum Café across the river from Westminster progresses: Bryant launching forth on weighty topics – the anger and guilt he still feels regarding his mother's alcoholism, how he dealt with her illness as a teenager after his father left, the spectre of authoritarianism – then changing to a lighter key just as things get serious. On two occasions he breaks into song; first a rendition of 'Do You Hear The People Sing' in the original French (he claims to have introduced Les Misérables to Peter Mandelson, who was so taken with it he used the rousing anthem as his campaign tune in Hartlepool), then Silvio Rodríguez's 'Ojalá' in Spanish. The latter word conveys the sentiment of 'if only' or 'I wish', which Bryant says has driven through a politics – a politics that has always been partially lived on stage, and as performance.
A Life And A Half ends in 2001, when Bryant was first elected. The news stories Bryant is best known for during his decades in public life – his furious crusade against phone-hacking, or (less favourably) the revelations about his property shenanigans unearthed during the 2009 expenses scandal – barely feature. Instead, we get his political journey, from leaving the public school his working-class parents sent him to and joining the Oxford University Conservative Association (he studied English), through the poverty of the Thatcher era and a stint as a young priest in Latin America getting a front-row seat to the realities of inequality, to the point where he campaigned for the Labour Party in 1992 and now says, 'I would call myself a socialist.'
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That's a self-definition with which some of Bryant's Labour colleagues might take issue. He jokes that in a production of The Emperor's New Clothes he once played a guard 'the main characteristic of whom is that he doesn't know his left from his right. And I think there's plenty of people who would say that I don't either.' Bryant rode the New Labour wave into politics, although he has doubts that Tony Blair ever really trusted him. His experience, both of Labour's 1992 defeat and of the party's 14 years out in the parliamentary wilderness cemented his pragmatic tendencies. To those who would prefer Labour to take a more ideologically purist stance, he says simply: 'It's about getting things done… If you're in opposition, all you're really doing is throwing snowballs at the guys on the bridge. It doesn't get you anywhere.'
This emphasis on actions over ideology dates back to Bryant's time on his post-ordination 'gap year' that took him to Christian ministries in Latin America. As is his style, the account is full of reeling juxtapositions: encountering grinding poverty on the streets of Peru, realising the blurriness of Christian theology by being asked to take Catholic mass despite being an Anglican when there were no priests available, meeting victims of torture in Argentina, smuggling a video tape of police abusing protestors out of Chile disguised as Disney's Fantasia – and, on one memorable occasion, taking three buses to the rough outskirts of town to follow a young man he'd met at a bar home for sex, only for their efforts to be interrupted by an earthquake. ('Nothing ventured, nothing gained!' he tells me when I bring up this high-risk endeavour.)
In Chile in particular, during the dying days of the Pinochet regime, Bryant recalls learning from a group of left-wing nuns to take ego out of activism. 'Change required serious organisation and discipline, not maverick pride,' he writes in the book. 'You could take two things from that political experience of being in Latin American,' he tells me back at the Garden Café. 'One is you could become an ardent fundamentalist about politics and campaign for a particular version of socialism or communism. What I took away from it was something slightly different which was you had to make your socialism work with the grain of humanity.'
Nowhere are the contradictions of Bryant's political life more apparent than in his victory in becoming the MP Rhondda – or, as he calls it, the Rhondda (now Rhondda and Ogmore, to use the full constituency name). How did a gay, former Tory, ex-public schoolboy who grew up in Spain and had an English name end up representing a constituency in the heart of the Valleys of South Wales? Bryant recalls in the book the assessment of Tom Baldwin (now Keir Starmer's biographer) after his selection in 2000: 'It would be difficult to find a Labour candidate less in keeping with the traditional image of the Rhondda.' But, Bryant adds, 'Maybe that said more about other people's preconceptions about the Rhondda.'
The story of the 2001 election campaign, from Bryant's perspective, is those preconceptions being proved wrong. He remembers a relentless focus on his sexuality (with newspapers constantly referring to him as 'exotic' or 'Labour's openly gay candidate') descending into innuendo, or on one occasion running the headline 'How pink was my valley?' He compares the novelty of his candidacy then with the situation today: 'I wouldn't be able to list the LGBT MPs to you now.' ('Too many?' I ask, obviously meaning too many too count. 'Far too many,' he replies, then goes for another joke. 'But I don't think we're going to cull them.')
Whatever the newspaper editors might have presumed about the view in the Valleys on homosexuality, the people of Rhondda had other ideas. Bryant won decisively, dashing Plaid Cymru's hopes of taking the seat off Labour. He has been there ever since, finding the community 'generous and accepting' when he and his partner moved in. With all this in mind, I ask what he makes of the stereotypes of the Valleys bandied around Westminster. Nigel Farage has his eye on Wales in next year's Senedd elections, hoping his brand of populism will find eager ears in the old industrial mining towns abandoned by the political establishment for the past half century.
'There is a very patronising understanding of what the Welsh Valleys are like,' Bryant replies. 'Both Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage have called for all the mines to be reopened in the Valleys. Everybody in the Rhondda certainly just blew a raspberry! They said, 'How patronising can you get? Why can't we be setting up AI companies or doing something fabulously modern?'' Instead of sending their children down the mines to 'die of pneumoconiosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease', they want decent, stable jobs in the communities so people don't have to move away for work. And, like Bryant himself, they want fairness.
'I think voters look for politicians who are human and that they can identify with. I'm not sure how much they care about what school they went to, but what they do care about is whether people could come and have a drink with them or not, have an open proper chat in a language that they understand.' He pauses, then clarifies he means 'a human language', rather than Welsh.
This is the reflective, pensive side of Bryant. The mischievous side involves sleight of hand and distraction – when asked a question he doesn't want to answer given his role as a government minister, he deflects by pointing out, apropos of nothing, 'There's quite a lot of sex in the book!' He name-drops shamelessly, from pointing out that Cilla Black came to his civil partnership to a horrifying anecdote about one of the women from the Rhondda Labour party meeting Bill Clinton at an event at Labour Party Conference and asking the former US President and special guest of Tony Blair 'Why didn't you get rid of that dress?'
The book similarly revels in playing with expectations. One chapter begins with a page-long musing on why gay men love gym changing rooms, and how, for London gays in the Nineties, the YMCA – or 'Y' – gym in Tottenham Court Road was a particular favourite. Just as the reader is wondering what this foray into homosexual pick-up culture could possibly have to do with Bryant's political journey, he reveals that, 'It was in the changing room at the Y that I met Peter Mandelson.' 'He knows how to talk round corners,' Bryant says when asked about his friendship with Mandelson, the maverick mastermind behind New Labour. Was he surprised when Keir Starmer picked him to be ambassador to the US? 'I texted him to congratulate him' – which we both know is not an answer.
But the most outlandish juxtapositions concern Bryant's relationship with the Church of England and the realities of life as a closeted Anglican priest. The knots the Church tied itself in over homosexuality, even when so many of its own clergy were gay, is tackled with his characteristic blend of rage and humour. One paragraph describes a church dinner where 'an ordinand paraded around in a variety of ever more elaborate vestments before dressing up in leathers and a harness to go to a club' – a 'particularly favourite combination', Bryant tells me – 'while an archdeacon fondled his lover and everyone chatted about the best place to pick up a handsome Guards officer'. Two lines later Bryant recounts how a fellow student at his theological college suddenly died. 'We all knew Aids had taken him… and nobody ever uttered a word.'
I ask Bryant what he makes of the Church of England now, and how far it has come since he chose to leave behind an alternative career as a vicar 34 years ago. 'One day it will just get its act together and go love is love,' he says, evoking once more the spirit of 'Ojalá'. Yet he is overwhelmingly glad to have left when he did. Had he remained a closeted clergyman, unable to enjoy a proper relationship without being terrified into secrecy, he fears he would have become 'a vicious, queeny, sharp, vindictive, unhappy, lonely, gin-and-lace vicar somewhere'. It's not an irrational fear – he saw it happen.
On the prolonged appointment process for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, he notes that, while a non-political appointment, 'the irony of it is you'd be engaged in more realpolitik than the British ambassador to the United Nations' given the tensions within the global Anglican community regarding, among other things, LGBT rights. Byrant himself has never been orthodox in his Christianity. 'I quite like that the fact that our national church doesn't really believe anything too strongly. I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing.'
And yet, Bryant does believe in things strongly. He believes in fairness, with childlike outrage where it is found to be warning – from the Church's stubbornness on homosexuality to the lockdown parties held in Downing Street when people were banned from attending funerals. He believes in democracy, which he calls a 'fragile flower', having seen up-close the authoritarian regimes of Franco's Spain and Pinochet's Chile. 'Every time anybody gets frustrated with democracy they say let's have a different system. That's dangerous.' Suggestions from politicians like Farage of appointing ministers from a pool of technocrats rather than elected MP horrify him: 'Oh so we're just binning democracy, are we? That's the way we're going?'
And he believes in seeing the humanity in people. 'Quite often when someone gets into trouble in politics, I'll drop them a note saying I hope they're OK,' he says, the former crusading chair of the standards committee now channelling the forgiving vibe of a C of E priest – or, perhaps, the 16-year-old boy tasked with nursing an alcoholic mother unwilling or unable to escape her addiction. That's in part what the book is about: an MP's memoir that stops as soon as he actually arrives in parliament, focusing instead on the much more human story of how he got there. MPs are human, even if some might rarely seem it.
Most of all, perhaps, he believes in compromise; grounded not in low expectations or apathy, but in pragmatism, and a belief that in any great institution – whether Parliament, or the Church of England – there should be room for people with differing views of how to make the world a better place. In his ideal world, he says, 'some people would waggle a tambourine and some people would waggle a thurible'. Ever the performer, he pauses for dramatic effect and then corrects himself. 'Swing a thurible. I don't think you can waggle a thurible.'
[See also: Trade unionist Joe Rollin: 'Orgreave was a trap, and we fell for it']
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