12 May 2013 03:37:45
One often hears it alleged that all politicians these days come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and are out of touch with the so-called real world. Up to a point, Lord Copper, but on the Labour side at least you don't have to scratch very hard to come up with politicians whose working-class credentials are impeccable. John Prescott started his working life as a steward on an ocean-going passenger liner. Jack Straw was one of five children of divorced parents brought up on a council estate in Essex. David Blunkett, who had the additional disadvantage of being blind, was the son of a Sheffield steelworker who died in an horrendous accident. Alan Milburn was the product of a single-parent family in the impoverished West End of Newcastle. But few politicians, if any, have a back story that is a patch on Alan Johnson's. Johnson, who was to hold five Cabinet posts including that of home secretary, was born five years after the war at the wrong end of pre-gentrification Notting Hill or, to be more precise, North Kensington. It was a world of slum landlords, gang warfare, race riots and, it must be said, a strong sense of community. His first home was two rooms in a tenement that, even before the war, had been declared unfit for habitation. There was no indoor toilet, no bathroom, the kitchen was a stove on the landing and the electricity was metered, which meant the family were constantly scrabbling for shillings and often had to rely on candles for light. As a young teenager he recounts walking the streets with an old pram scavenging for coal and the repeated humiliation of having to ask local shopkeepers for goods on tick.
His mother, Lily, a respectable working-class woman from Liverpool, had made the mistake of marrying Steve, a feckless ne'er-do-well who played the piano in local pubs and eventually ran off with a barmaid, after which his only contact with his family was the occasional postal order. "Steve was a dark shadow in our lives…My fear wasn't losing a father, it was having one," writes Johnson.
Alan as a toddler with his sister, Linda, and mother, Lily. Photograph: © Alan Johnson
Lily, and Johnson's sister, Linda, are the heroes of this story. Lily, whose life was a constant struggle against loneliness, grinding poverty and poor health, managed in the teeth of great odds to bring her children up decently. She died, aged 42, leaving Alan and Linda, aged 13 and 16, to fend for themselves. At which point Linda took over. Resisting attempts to take them into care, she succeeded in persuading the local authority to find them a council flat in Battersea and held the fort until Alan was old enough to make his way in the world. His first job (apart from a milk round) was as a postal clerk at the headquarters of razor manufacturer Remington. He later graduated to a Tesco's warehouse. All he ever wanted was to be a pop star and he almost made it.
This is the biography of a politician like no other. From time to time one has to pinch oneself to recall that this is not an account of childhood in Victorian England but of life in the England of the 1950s and 60s, the era when many of us had never had it so good. Far from being a misery memoir, however, it is beautifully observed, humorous, moving, uplifting; told with a dry, self-deprecating wit and not a trace of self-pity.
Given his start in life Alan Johnson could have been forgiven had he turned into an angry, bitter class-warrior instead of the affable, sensible, laidback politician that he was to become. Over and over I kept thinking how proud his poor mother would be had she lived long enough to see how young Alan turned out.
Had the dice landed differently he might have risen even further than he did. I once asked the mighty Nicholas Soames, who was in the process of telling me that David Cameron would murder Gordon Brown, who he thought we should choose as Labour leader. Without hesitation he replied, "Alan Johnson".
