About this Event
Chris Bryant has been the Member of Parliament for Rhondda since 2001. He was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster. But how did he get there?
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, finding himself running the family household from the age of 16. His varied and frequently challenging younger years left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay clubs, on the hustings or the stage, all experiences which are chronicled in his award-winning memoir A Life and a Half. The joy and sorrow with which he recounts them reveal a wisdom which has no doubt come in useful in 25 years of political life.
Join us to hear Bryant’s gripping stories of bishops and actors, drag queens and pushy candidates, all while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour.
Chris Bryant has been the Member of Parliament for Rhondda since 2001. He was Deputy Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Europe in the last Labour government, and has been Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Shadow Leader of the House of Commons. The author of six previous books, he has written regularly for the Guardian and the Independent, and has appeared on every major TV and radio news and current affairs programme. He was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster.
John Grindrod is the author of four books, his most recent being Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Loves Behind Net Curtains (Faber, 2026), which the Guardian called a ‘fantastically entertaining alternative history of queer life in Britain’. His previous three books, Concretopia, Outskirts and Iconicon are a loose trilogy on the social history of modern places. He also has a podcast, Monstrosities Mon Amour, in which he interviews people about places and things they love, but which other people hate.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Conduit, 6 Langley Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 16.96
