Labour MP Alan Johnson has a date with York Literature Festival

ALAN Johnson is regularly described as ‘the greatest Prime Minister we never had’. Isn’t that a bit painful?

He snorts. He’s one of a long list of ‘greatest PMs we never had’, he says. “It’s better than being the worst PM we ever had.”

So the 63-year-old MP for Hull West and Hessle has no regrets about never quite making it all the way to the top of the political tree?

No, he says. He held one of the three great offices of state - when he was Home Secretary under Gordon Brown from June 2009 to May 2010 - plus a number of other Cabinet posts, including education and health secretary.

“That’s good enough for me.”

Politicians don’t usually use language like ‘good enough’. Whether or not he truly feels satisfied with his political career only he himself knows. But given where he came from, his political achievements are remarkable.

We’re talking on the telephone ahead of his visit to York on Saturday, March 22 to talk about his childhood memoir, This Boy, during this year’s York Literature Festival.

The book is no ordinary politician’s memoir. For a start, there is no dreary selfjustification, no cataloguing of political victories gained or points scored. Instead, this is a searing, heartfelt account of a childhood of real poverty and hardship.

Johnson isn’t even really the hero of his own memoir. That place falls to his motherLily - and, after she died when he was just 13 years old, to his sister Linda, who was three years older than him.

Lily was what Johnson describes as a “cheery, chirpy Scouser”. She married her husband Steve on the rebound, Johnson says - the man she had been engaged to for a long time was killed in the war.

It was to prove a deeply unhappy marriage.

Steve Johnson proved - at least in the version of him we get in Johnson’s book - to be a feckless slacker and ladies’ man. He had affairs: and when he was drunk, Johnson said, he “knocked my mum around.” He never beat the young Alan - Lily and Linda always managed to protect him from what was going on, Johnson says - but the family never had any money.

Home was two rooms in a condemned house in Southam Street, North Kensington.

One was for sleeping in, and one for eating in, Johnson writes in his book. It was the 1950s, but there was no electricity - either in the house itself, or in the street outside, which was lit by gas lamps.

Everyone in the building used “the same front door and the single decrepit toilet in the small concrete yard that backed on to the railway line in and out of Paddington Station”.

Then, when Johnson was just eight years old, his father ran off. Lily believed passionately that children should be brought up by two parents, and fought to save the marriage. But neither Alan nor Linda were sorry when their father went.

“It was the happiest day of our lives,” he says. “I didn’t like my father very much.”

Steve’s departure, however, condemnedthe family to even worse poverty. The struggle to bring up her two children decently ultimately proved too much for Lily.

She was already ill before her husband left. She died a few years later, at the age of 42, following a failed operation to correct mitral stenosis - a condition of valves of the heart.

Johnson’s voice still falters all these years later at the memory of it.

With Lily gone, it was left to Linda to bring the young Alan up. She was just 16 herself. But she succeeded in persuading the local authority to find a council flat for her and her brother, and looked after him until he was able to look after himself.

This Boy is actually a tribute to these two women. His mother, Johnson says, gave him a proper start in life. “She instilled the principles I think are important.” She also had ambitions for her son: for him to grow up to a life better than her own. “She wanted me to be a draughtsman, and to wear a suit.”

Linda, meanwhile, gave up her own childhood to protect her brother’s.

So would Lily have been proud to see what her son made of himself ?

“She would have been proud of me if I had become a draughtsman!” he says.

And Linda? She lives in Australia now, where she runs her own nursery business.

“She’s done wonderfully well,” he says.

“And she’s the secretary of the Aussie branch of my fan club!”

Alan Johnson will be at St Peter’s School, Clifton, York, from 7-9pm on Saturday, March 22 to talk about This Boy as part of the York Literature Festival.

Tickets cost £6 plus £1 booking fee from the Theatre Royal box office on 01904 623568 or online from yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

Hurry: tickets are selling fast.