Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Gary Murphy and this is

the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives

and the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week should really be writing

about big ideas because here's the Shadow Health Secretary. West Dreesing has just published

a book called One Boy Two Bills in a Fry Up, a memoir of growing up and getting on. And

it really is a memoir, it's not the kind of book I was expecting, it's not full of politics

but it's really a sort of a family history and a book about his life as a young boy

and then as a young man. Where's welcome and thanks for coming in and as I say, I mean

it came as a bit of a surprise to me this book because I thought it would be full of

my political philosophy and all of that and actually it's about granddad and all those

sorts of things. Why have you framed it like that? A couple of years ago I'd had kidney

cancer and I came back from some time off while I was undergoing surgery and recovery and

I did an interview with Rachel Silvester at the Times which was meant to be sort of a coming

back to work interview really and talking about what I wanted to achieve, my experience

with kidney cancer and Rachel asked me a bit about my background and upbringing because

she was already aware that I'm from a working class background that in itself sets me apart

from lots of my colleagues in Parliament and the more she asks and the more I told and

the more I could see her scribbling away, I thought oh this is clearly this interview's

going in a different direction now and sure enough when it landed it caught the attention

of Tom who actually then became my editor, Hodder, who said if you ever considered writing

a memoir but I guess what I wanted to do with the book was to through this story I guess

challenged some prejudices and preconceptions and stereotypes about the poverty trap. There's

...