During his training to become an Anglican priest in the mid-1980s, Chris Bryant made a note in his journal: “I feel very much not clean enough to be a priest… I want to be cleaner, and perhaps I’m beginning to discover some of the strength to resist just the passing sexual urges, but can I love as my sexuality allows and still be a priest?”
He’d already learned at boarding school to avert his gaze, rather than be caught looking at other boys, and later tried to persuade himself that “hankering after men was just an urge that needed to be suppressed.”
Even after making his way into the world of politics, he concluded that “being gay involved subterfuge.” In 1987, then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher said children “being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay…. are being cheated of a sound start in life.” Soon after, her government introduced Section 28 legislation, banning local authorities and schools from what it called “intentionally promoting homosexuality”.
“The world told me that homosexuality was immoral,” Bryant tells me. “I internalised all of that, and it took me quite a while to work out, ‘I’m gay—everyone else can just get over it.’”
In 2010, Bryant became the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster. But the conflicted emotions he felt growing up in British society is a thread that runs through his new memoir A Life and a Half.
The book was written, says the Labour minister, partly to show people that “politicians are human beings.” In it, Bryant recounts growing up with an alcoholic mother and a distant father: mopping his mother’s blood off the kitchen floor after a fall, pouring away bottles of vodka, learning to cook meals and iron his father’s shirts to avert arguments. That often horrific early life left him angry, but also compassionate.
Poverty was the biggest factor that steered his politics, first in the UK (especially in areas hit by the miners’ strikes), then during his time as a priest in Peru and Argentina. “I saw the effect of right-wing politics on Latin America, in terms of violence, human rights repression and poverty, and that turned me from the little Tory I probably was when I left school into the young clergymen who joined the Labour party in 1986.”
“It was not so much about the Tory party and Thatcherism, but about left and right: whether you believe poverty is a mysterious dispensation that descends from heaven on some people and not on others, or if you believe poverty is caused by human failings and the way we structure society.”
Now minister of state for business and trade, Bryant surely must be aware that voters’ patience with the Labour government seems to have worn thin. Is there an identity crisis in his party? “Labour stands for two things,” Bryant counters. “Firstly, trying to sort out a lot of the mess. The second thing is a fundamental belief that some people haven’t had a fair chance in life, and they deserve a better chance.”
As Labour faces challenges from the left and the rising popularity of Reform, Bryant doesn’t think “any political party can take anything for granted”. “As it happens, I don’t think there will be a Tory party in 15 years’ time.”
Away from politics, Bryant, 64, announced in May 2024 that his skin cancer had spread to his lung. “I’m well—I don’t have any cancer in me,” he tells me now. “They check me every few months. I had a really tough time last year with the treatment—immunotherapy is great but it gave me pancreatitis”. The six months on steroids were also “pretty ghastly”.
“The diagnosis has changed me in the sense that I’ve got less time for faffing around,” he says, “I can’t be doing with internal rows—a waste of time and energy. I prefer to get on and get things done.”
