Chris Bryant

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Chris Bryant

Chris Bryant.Portrait.jpg

Name Christopher John Bryant (born 11 January, 1962)
Nicknames Captain Underpants (everyone)
Politics
Party Labour
Constituency The Rhondda(2001-Present)
Positions • Shadow Leader of the House (14 September 2015 - 26 June 2016)
• Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (11 May 2015 - 14 September 2015)
• Shadow Minister for the Arts (3 December 2014 - 11 May 2015)
• Shadow Minister for Welfare Reform (8 October 2013 - 3 December 2014)
• Shadow Minister for Immigration (7 October, 2011 - 8 October 2013)
• Shadow Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform (8 October, 2010 - 7 October, 2011)
• Minister for Europe and Asia (13, October 2009 – 11 May, 2010)
Likes Rugby, swimming, colourful ties, Twitter, Shakespeare
Dislikes Phone hacking, News International, Russia, Chekhov, football, Jaffa Cakes
Friends Tom Watson, John Bercow, Luciana Berger, PETER BONE
Enemies Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Mark Harper, Nadine Dorries, Plaid Cymru, John Yates, Rebekah Brooks, News International, Jeremy Corbyn
Relationships
Partners Jared Cranney (2008 - Present)
Children None
Personal Attributes
Nationality Welsh
Religion Anglican (currently boycotting Church of England over gay clergy policy)
Sexuality Gay
Height 5' 10.5"
Eye Colour Grey
Handedness Right
Accent Estuary
Languages Spanish, some French, Italian phrases he learned from operas

A bumptious little berk.~ The Sun

My ties get commented on more than my speeches, I reckon. ~ Chris Bryant Is that because your ties are pointed, colourful, and just the right length? ~ Matt Chorley

Labour middlebencher Chris Bryant led the fight in Parliament to expose the NOTW phone hacking scandal. He is otherwise notable in the Commons for his vigorous defense of the authority of Parliament, his frequent points of order, his friendly relationship with Speaker John Bercow, his tendency to chunter, and his flamboyant ties. Outside the House he is famous for calling air-headed presenter Kay Burley 'a bit dim' and for a photograph he took of himself wearing a deeply unfortunate pair of y-fronts, which The Daily Mail acquired and inflicted on the general public.

Life and Career[edit | edit source]

Early Life[edit | edit source]

Wee Chris and family.

Chris was born in Cardiff to Rees Bryant, a Welsh computer programmer, and his Scottish wife Gracie, an arts student from Glasgow. He was soon joined by his younger brother Rhodri. When he was seven the family moved to Spain so that his father could run the IT department for Chrysler's Spanish branch, first in Bilbao and then in Madrid. The Bryants moved back to the UK five years later, but his time in Franco's Spain left Chris fluent in Spanish and with a lifelong concern for human rights.

Chris was enrolled as a day boy at Cheltenham College, where he became captain of the swimming team and joined the National Youth Theatre. But despite the posh surroundings and the escape from fascism, things had taken a turn for the worse in the Bryant household. Gracie was an alcoholic, and Rees, unable to cope, abandoned the family, leaving teenaged Chris as the oldest sober person in the home. Chris tried to combat his mother's addiction, but it was an endless struggle that resulted in some harrowing experiences. His first date ended with him coming home to find his mother lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, after she fell and hit her head. Once he tried to grow an avocado stone only to discover it had failed to grow a root because it was suspended not over water, but vodka. Fortunately he had support from his teachers and from his school chaplain, who took him in for a year when his home life was disintegrating and who inspired him to join the clergy.

Chris went on to attend Mansfield College, Oxford, alongside such Tory notables as Boris Johnson and William Hague. Chris, then a Tory, was actually an officer in the Oxford University Conservative Association, where he campaigned unsuccessfully on behalf of the Tory Reform Group against Thatcherite William's bid for the association presidency. He graduated with a Master's degree in English, which he followed with a degree in theology from Ripon College Cuddesdon.

Pastoral Career[edit | edit source]

Chris was first posted to Walker, in Newcastle, where the abject poverty of Thatcher's Britain led him to reconsider his political allegiances. He traveled to Latin America, studying with liberation theologist Gustavo Gutiérrez and working for a human rights organization in Buenos Aires. He was supposed to spend three months in Chile, but he was forced to leave the country after a week because he led the prayers at the funeral of a boy who'd had petrol poured over him by the police. The police arrived with water cannons and tear gas, and sent Chris packing.

He didn't return home empty handed, however; he came back with a canister of Pinochet's tear gas, made in Britain. He wrote about it to Chris Patten, the Tory Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who never answered his letter. Then he wrote to Simon Hughes, who told him to write to Patten. Then he wrote to George Foulkes, who invited him over for tea. Chris promptly defected to the Labour Party.

He was ordained in December, 1986, and spent the next two and a half years as curate at All Saints, High Wycombe. In 1989 he became Youth Chaplain to the diocese of Peterborough, but two years later the Church of England's increasingly hostile policy toward homosexuality led him to conclude that being gay and being an Anglican priest were incompatible. A week after he ordained Chris, the Bishop of Oxford said, "I've never laid hands on a gay man." Chris decided it wasn't a battle he wanted to spend the rest of his life fighting, and left the ministry.

Early Political Career[edit | edit source]

Chris became the election agent to the Holborn and St. Pancreas Labour Party, and successfully campaigned for Frank Dobson in the 1992 general election. In 1993 he became the Labour Party's Local Government Development Officer and he was elected to the Hackney Borough Council, where he served as a councillor until 1998. During the same period he was also chair of the Christian Socialist Movement, which affiliated with the Labour Party in 1994. From 1994 to 1996 he was London Manager for the charity Common Purpose. He followed this by writing biographies of Stafford Cripps and Glenda Jackson and a history of Christian Socialism, Possible Dreams. In the 1997 general election he contested the safe Tory seat of Wycombe and lost by only 2,370 votes. To kill the time before the next general election, he became Head of European Affairs at the BBC from 1998 to 2000, lobbying for the corporation in Brussels.

Chris in an inexplicable gingham shirt. Perhaps he wished to reassure his constituents that while he might be gay, he has no fashion sense.

In May of 2000 he was selected as the Labour candidate for the Rhondda, much to his own surprise. Chris had actually promised his then-boyfriend that there was no chance of him being selected in the traditional Welsh valley, being openly gay and far worse, from Cardiff, but he gave it his best shot despite the long odds, going door to door and introducing himself to all 700 members of the constituency Labour Party. His constituents, living in one of the safest Labour seats in the country and long accustomed to being taken for granted by their MPs, were impressed by the show of willing and selected him over several local candidates. The revelation of his Tory past after he was already selected prompted a internal scuffle in the local Labour Party, with his predecessor briefly threatening to stand against him, but in the end party discipline prevailed and the Rhondda sent Chris to Parliament with such a healthy majority that the Tory candidate lost his deposit.

Parliamentary Career[edit | edit source]

On the Back Benches[edit | edit source]

There was a time when I had an ambition that was all about rising to great office, and it made me a pretty odious member of the House of Commons.~ Chris Bryant

Chris was initially tipped for great things- a 2002 profile in The Times suggested he might even be the first openly gay prime minister. But his naked ambition, his abrasiveness and his tendency to wax sanctimonious in his speeches didn't win him any friends among his colleagues on the Labour benches, and his aggressive debating style and his tendency to suck up to the leadership won him a reputation as Tony Blair's attack poodle among the Opposition. In one of Michael Howard's rare instances of successful humor, he once observed that one could always tell when the Government was in trouble because they would call on Chris and start singing "Help me, Rhondda, help, help me, Rhondda".

Chris's problems were compounded when he made the mistake of tripping up Sun editor Rebekah Brooks in a Select Committee hearing. After an article about a constituent's child's disability was published in the local paper and the Press Complaints Commission did nothing about it when the family went to them for redress, Chris became concerned about privacy issues and the power of the press. He'd found a number of articles that seemed to contain information leaked by the police, so when Brooks appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, he asked her if she'd ever paid the police for information, fully expecting her to deny it. Brooks said yes, not realizing that she was confessing to a crime, and Andy Coulson confirmed it. Chris pointed out that suborning a police officer was illegal, and Coulson tried frantically to backtrack, but it was too late- the confession was made.

The Pants of Shame

Six months later, The Daily Mail obtained a picture Chris had taken of himself wearing some truly awful y-fronts and emailed to some contacts from the dating website Gaydar. The Fail, never one to pass by an opportunity for homophobia, published the photo, and Brooks, acting purely out of regard for the public interest and without the least thought of revenge in her curly copper head, whipped the tabloids up into a feeding frenzy. They doorstepped everyone Chris knew, hacked into his phone messages, and inadvertently outed a former boyfriend when they called the boyfriend's mother to ask if she knew about his relationship with Chris. The media storm and the collateral damage to his friends and family were hideous for Chris, who briefly contemplated suicide. He even wound up with a pair of stalkers from all the publicity. One came to his flat after his address was made public. "I'm very submissive," the stalker said over the intercom. "Well, piss off then," Chris answered. The stalker replied, "I'm not that submissive." The other stalker wound up in prison.

The Rhondda: less homophobic than the Murdochs hoped

The press predicted the scandal would end his career, and there was much speculation about his impending deselection. Rhondda was less impressed with all the furore, and not only failed to deselect him, but returned him with an increased majority in the next election despite a 5.5 % national swing against Labour. Still, Chris's prospects for a seat in Tony Blair's controversy-shy cabinet were well and truly scotched. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because he realized Tony's reputation as a war criminal was not doing the Labour Party any favours, Chris joined with the Brownites in the Curry House Plot to oust Blair, co-authoring a letter with Siôn Simon signed by fifteen loyal New Labour backbenchers urging him to resign.

In Government[edit | edit source]

Bryant, Chris Bryant.

The Curry House Plot succeeded, albeit slowly, and Chris's disloyalty was rewarded when he was made Harriet Harman's PPS the day after Blair resigned. In October 2008 he was made Deputy Leader of the House of Commons, and in June 2009 he became a PUS at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In October of that year he became Minister for Europe, a job that was downgraded in rank from a Minister of State to a PUS just for him. The change reflected the fact that the Government already had the maximum number of ministers in the Minister of State pay bracket, rather than Gordon Brown's opinion of Chris's caliber. Probably.

His time in office was characterized by neither triumph nor disaster. The Chris Bryant who appeared at the dispatch box was a slightly muted version of the one from the back benches, witty and occasionally obnoxiously pious. Still, he managed to resist his compulsion to cause a diplomatic incident with Russia by complaining about the many dead journalists buried under Putin's dacha for seven whole months, so he deserves a gold star for effort. He was caught up in the expenses scandal after flipping his second home twice in a five year period, but although some of his claims were rejected he didn't have to pay anything back.

Full List of Appointments
• PPS to Lord Falconer, Department for Constitutional Affairs (10 Nov,. 2005 - 13 June 2006)
• PPS to Harriet Harman, Leader of the House of Commons (28 June, 2007 - 10 Dec., 2008)
• Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (6 Oct., 2008 - 10 June, 2009)
• PUS at Foreign and Commonwealth Office (10 June, 2009 -13 Oct., 2009)
• Minister for Europe and Asia (13 Oct., 2009- 11 May, 2010)
• Shadow Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform (8 Oct., 2010 - 7 Oct., 2011)
• Shadow Minister for Immigration (7 Oct, 2011 - 8 Oct 2013)
• Shadow Minister for Welfare Reform (8 Oct., 2013 - 3 Dec., 2014)
• Shadow Minister for the Arts (3 Dec., 2014 - 11 May 2015)
• Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (11 May 2015 - 14 September 2015)
• Shadow Leader of the House (14 September 2015 - 26 June 2016)

In Opposition[edit | edit source]

Aggressive, extremely articulate, bears personal grudges, a lot of hatred there and seemingly rather a lot to prove.~ Anonymous Source in The Guardian

Freed from his ministerial responsibilities after Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, Chris has had ample time to pursue his political hobbies: revealing the phone hacking coverup, arguing about constitutional reform, defending the authority of Parliament with well-researched but facetious points of order, harassing Plaid Cymru and Nick Clegg, and annoying Russia . Chris enjoys giving William Hague an exciting challenge at Foreign Office Questions by bringing up human rights abuses in countries Britain wants to befriend, like Russia or Syria, and watching the Foreign Secretary try to squirm out of either condoning the atrocity or offending the despotic ally. He also likes to pursue his eternal vendetta against the only viable rivals for his Rhondda seat, Plaid Cymru, and to join in the general Labour Clegg-bashing. But perhaps his favourite pastime is asking John Bercow to flex his Speakerly muscles and smack down those who would dare flout the authority of Parliament, be they on Fleet Street or sitting on the Treasury Bench. John never takes him up on these calls to arms, but one senses he is flattered to be asked.

In October of 2010 he got into a scuffle with Nick Clegg over his claim that the poor would be 'socially engineered and sociologically cleansed out of London' by the Government's housing benefit reforms. Nick took umbrage at the phraseology and said it was offensive to people who'd experienced ethnic cleansing; Chris replied that he'd never said it was ethnic cleansing, and what was really offensive was the Government introducing a scheme that would make London rents unaffordable to many Londoners and then lying about the figures. They were both right, and they've been bitter foes ever since.

Chris, planning to get all socialist up in this place

Chris ran in the 2010 Shadow Cabinet election but came about twenty-five votes short of a cabinet position. Ed Miliband made him Shadow Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, shadowing Mark Harper and Nick Clegg. This was a slightly awkward brief, since the Labour front bench agree with the broad sweep of most of the proposed reforms and they all know deep down that they really should have implemented them themselves while they were still in government. But Chris was given two windfalls in the Government's disorganized approach to passing legislation and Nick Clegg's immense unpopularity, and he exploited them to the fullest, focusing on operational failures and the jagged, exposed seams of the coalition agreement revealed by some of the Government's more absurd proposals rather than attacking the principles of the reforms themselves. He found himself an unlikely ally in arch-conservative and eldritch horror PETER BONE, with whom he cheerfully batted the Government's procedural inadequacies back and forth across the floor of the House like a badminton birdie while poor Mark Harper sat on the Treasury Bench and tried to resist the urge to stab himself through the eye with his pen.

In the 2011 reshuffle, Chris was given a lateral transfer to Shadow Immigration, a brief about which it swiftly became apparent he gave zero fucks. Bitter tears were wept on the lolitics forums when he was denied the Culture, Media and Sport portfolio he so clearly deserved for his work on the hacking scandal, but initial dismay was replaced by a creeping suspicion that Chris may be best suited to the backbenches where he can raise points of order and troll the Tories without being responsible for anything important. So far his tenure has been characterized by a lot of synthetic outrage and random calls for the Immigration Minister Damian Green to resign, but it's hoped that his replacement with Mark Harper in the 2012 Cabinet reshuffle will usher in a bright new era in which Chris at least bothers to proofread his statements.

Although Chris has managed to needle the Government in his official capacity, by far his most prominent and successful role in opposition has been as a leader of Parliament's crusade against phone hacking. Along with Labour backbencher Tom Watson, Chris has been lobbying for a more thorough investigation into criminal practices by the press for years. After Rebekah Brooks' accidental confession in 2003, he asked Home Office ministers about papers bribing police, but they brushed him off, accepting News International and the Met's assurances that such a thing was inconceivable. In 2006 the first phone hacking story broke, and Chris again tried to get the Government to look into it and found himself stonewalled. When civil cases were brought against the News of the World and the police were forced to release some of the evidence they were holding, he learned that his own phone had been hacked.

In September of 2010, Chris managed to get a debate in Parliament on whether the hacking of MPs' phones should be referred to the Standards and Privileges Committee. He was interviewed about the debate on Sky News and achieved some degree of celebrity when he told moronic anchor and Murdoch shill Kay Burley that she seemed to be a bit dim, if she didn't mind him saying so. Kay did mind, but Chris spoke for a grateful nation.

The speech ain't bad, but what a tie, what a tie.

In January Andy Coulson resigned from Number 10 and the next day the police launched a new investigation into the evidence they'd been holding for the past five years. This led to a stream of damning new allegations, culminating in early July with the revelation that the News of the World had hacked into murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone and deleted some of her messages, misleading her family into thinking she might still be alive. Chris requested an emergency debate under Standing Order 24, which Bercow granted against the wishes of the Government. Chris delivered an excellent speech and wore a gorgeous tie, and everyone was suitably impressed. MPs fawned over him embarrassingly and he once again found himself plastered all over the nation's newspapers, this time fully clothed.

Over the next year as the Leveson Inquiry investigated the hacking scandal and other issues surrounding the non-existent ethical standards of Britain's tabloid press, it became apparent that David Cameron and his Tory colleagues were tightly linked to the Murdochs. Chris pursued the scandal enthusiastically, perhaps excessively so. He first got himself into trouble when he raised a point of order accusing the Prime Minister of misleading the House over meetings with the Murdochs. So eager was Chris to level the accusation that he forgot his usually comprehensive grasp of parliamentary procedure and tried to raise it at the end of Prime Minister's Questions, and shouted "You'll regret this!" when Bercow refused to take it. When he finally did manage to raise the objection, he found himself in trouble with Lord Justice Leveson for using material before it was available to the general public.

Greatest Moments
Date Summary Video Transcript
9/9/2010 Debate on referring phone hacking to the Standards and Privileges Committee Watch it here Debate in Hansard
9/9/2010 Chris informs Kay Burley that she seems "a bit dim" Kay: Do you have evidence to support your claim that phone hacking was endemic not only at News of the World but at other newspapers? Pretty strong claim to make if you don't.
Chris: The information commissioner produced a report, which if you'd listened to the debate earlier or you'd read that report you'd see he refers to more than a thousand cases in various different newspapers, something like eight hundred instances in the Mail alone.
Kay: So you are in a position to have listened to that debate and have read that report; as a result you are content to say that on telly.
Chris: ...
Chris: I have just said it. You seem to be a bit dim, if you don't mind my saying so.
6/7/2010 Emergency Debate on Phone Hacking Watch it here

Personal Life[edit | edit source]

The happy couple. Chris wore a kilt. (He's half-Scottish; he's allowed.)

As a young man Chris dated girls, although he says he (significant pause) dabbled. He was actually engaged to be married in his final year at university, but that didn't pan out, and when he was twenty-five his girlfriend at the time made a startling observation: 'By the way, Chris, you know you're gay, don't you?' On reflection, Chris decided that he was. His friends and family accepted the news without acrimony; his girlfriend had, after all, been the one to drop the bombshell on Chris rather than the reverse, and his parents were equally positive about the revelation. "I should always have known," his mother said. "You walk so oddly." Chris met his partner Jared Cranney, a company secretary, in 2008 while campaigning with Ken Livingstone in Soho. They were got hitched in March 2010 in the MPs' dining room overlooking the Thames, in the first civil partnership to be held in the House of Commons[1].

Chris is very fond of sport. He swims, runs marathons, and plays rugby. On the whole he is rather good at it; he's the Parliamentary swimming champion, not an unimpressive achievement for a man pushing fifty. But in the spring of 2011 he broke his leg playing rugby after two men tackled him simultaneously from different directions, and he had to spend the next month hopping around the Commons Chamber on one foot every time he needed to vote.

Political Beliefs[edit | edit source]

True to his Tory origins, Chris is a pretty standard Blairite- his primary approach to addressing poverty is getting everyone off benefits and into the work force, with a stick if necessary. His experiences with totalitarian regimes have made him a fervent interventionalist, and he still believes invading Iraq was the right thing to do and it was just the implementation that was horribly botched. He's a strong believer in mandatory, high quality sex and relationship education, and has been on of the more strident voices against Nadine Dorries' various forms of madness. Although he says he doesn't think of himself as a gay MP, he does take an interest in gay rights issues, and after the David Laws scandal he was quick to condemn David's dishonesty, saying that as MPs were some of the most powerful people in the country there was no excuse for them to remain closeted.

Portrayal[edit | edit source]

In the Media[edit | edit source]

The main thing the papers used to say about Chris, every time his name appeared, was that everyone had seen him in his underpants. They still mention it, but in a very brief comment after a long paragraph about how he saved the world from Rupert Murdoch.

In Culture[edit | edit source]

In Fanon[edit | edit source]

Chris is sometimes magical and even useful on occasion.

Meme[edit | edit source]

Chris isn't tremendously popular, but he does show up from time to time, often with John Bercow. This association has led to him being deemed a fellow wizard in some stories. In recent months he has also appeared in the company of Tom Watson, doing battle against the Murdoch Empire.

Shipping[edit | edit source]

Brycow: although various other pairings have been suggested, thus far Chris has only been shipped with Bercow, a romance that derives from their many flirty points of order exchanges.

The RP[edit | edit source]

Chris is a wizard in the RP verse. He seems to spend most of his time trying to get John to have an opinion on something and continuing his crusades against the Murdoch empire. He helped in the capture of an escaped werewolf but was locked out of all the subsequent action, much to Chris's annoyance. He also spent some time trapped as a swan.

References[edit | edit source]

  1. They were not allowed to use the Chapel. At the ceremony, Chris ended up shouting quite a lot at the then Deputy Serjeant at Arms because, for security reasons, the guests were not permitted to walk through Westminster Hall.