Alan Johnson MP Meet the Author

Now BBC News it is time for meet the author.

Many political memoirs seem rather routine and end up gathering

He's just published volume three and the first two

The Long and Winding Road covers his transition from trade

union leader to Labour MP and, eventually, to Home Secretary.

Unlike the earlier books, it's full of insights about politics

from the perspective of someone who grew up without any

And of course it raises many interesting questions

Did you ever think it would stretch to three volumes?

Because originally I just wanted to do the childhood memoir.

I wanted to be the biographer of my mother, that's

She died young, I, of course, was much younger.

And kind of making her live again on the page and describing not just

what she went through, but the context of that.

And so I got to kind of 80,000 words and I'd only reached the age of 18.

Then there was interest in the second volume.

Then I recognised it would probably be...

What's interesting about this, of course, is that it's the story

of one life that led you to a very unexpected place.

You didn't grow up believing you would ever have a public life.

And, in a way, it's the story of a kind that is strangely more

difficult to imagine now than it was in your own era.

When people ask me, do I think a postman could ever make it

into the House of Commons, I say it's less likely.

Though we do have a taxi driver, a minor, a gas fitter and all that.

It's an extraordinary observation, isn't it?

I suppose the difference between me and people like David Blunkett,

born blind, his father died when he was five.

David Davis never knew his father, born on a council estate.

University, I hope, will change higher education,

it's not the be all and end all, but it has widened and it's no

That will have the opportunity to change other people's lives.

To have no qualifications whatsoever and to leave school at 15,

which is not a good role model for kids today,

as I keep telling them, and then to end up as Home

As the reader goes to the story I think one of the things that

will be striking is that you talk in many places in the book,

as in previous warnings, it's very moving, about your experiences,

All the oddities of your family setup.

But you do it without any obvious feeling of a chip on the shoulder

I think me and my sister, who grew up with me in those

difficult circumstances, we haven't got any chips

And that's really because I was lucky to have my sister

I've had lots of letters and e-mails from people who went through far

more difficult times than me and we have this wonderful

social worker, Mr Pepper, who stopped us being separated

If that had happened there might have been a lot

of chips on my shoulder and my sister's shoulder.

Really it's the story of someone who was very

In a way that many of my colleagues in Parliament...

They worked for years to try and get a constituency.

It's clearly a story, we know this from the way

the first volume sold, clearly a story that does

Of course, in this volume, you reach the pinnacle of your time

in politics as Home Secretary, one of the three great

Of course that comes about at a terribly interesting

moment, because it's a couple of years after the transition

from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and you are quite frank

about the difficulty of that transition and maybe some

of the mistakes that were made at the time.

I want to get a sense of how it felt, and how it felt when Gordon

took over from Tony was that it had all been handled badly, you know,

the pressure on Tony to go when he was going to go anyway

before the end of that parliamentary term.

But then, to our amazement, the way Gordon caught

the public imagination, and we were 15 points

I remember, I say in the book, we were at Chequers

at the end of the summer saying, this is amazing.

What happened was Gordon's indecision about

It's a wonder that all those advisers...

A missed moment because his reputation for honesty,

well-deserved incidentally, and thoroughness, and being more

concerned about getting on with the job, you know,

At the end of our conference, when we were still whatever,

12, 13 points ahead, instead of either saying, we're

going to have an election or we're not going to have an election...

You think he should have done it, don't you?

No, I don't think he should have had an election, I think he should have

gone and said, look, for me personally maybe that

would be a good thing but I don't think it's good

I think for the good of the country I'm going to carry on.

I'm not going to call a general election just because it would be

politically advantageous for me and the Labour Party.

This isn't a book about regrets, it's a book about enormous pride,

and it's a book in which you talk about the texture of a life that

took you from what I usually called humble beginnings to

Just thinking of regrets, you were deeply involved

in the referendum campaign, the European referendum campaign.

Indeed, you were leading the labour pro-Europe policy.

Do you regret not putting more into that?

Given the view you take on the European question?

I think we put everything we could into it.

Of course, I wouldn't say we ran a perfect campaign, but we got 66%

I think it should have been 74%, not 66%.

The problem there was all Cameron's, from first to last.

I don't know if there will be a future volume from you on politics

or on yourself, but where do you think the current state

Well, now that we've had Jeremy Corbyn's re-election again,

What we can't afford is for Labour not being capable of winning

an election, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We've got to get Jeremy Corbyn that, for all kinds of reasons.

For all kinds of reasons, I don't want to go back to a period

that I described there, actually, I lived through it in the trade

union movement, when our motto seemed to be "No compromise

There is nothing new about what Jeremy

I just think it doesn't take account of Britain in the modern world

and doesn't take account of working people and the lives

They are not the huddled masses of 1900.

I think when in fact, if we get that right,

I think there's an enormous opportunity for social,

democratic socialism, in the 21st-century.

Under him?

In the sense that I don't want to lose another election.

Hello there, during the first week of October we saw temperatures

slightly above average for the time of year and as we head