Sir Chris Bryant: “I don't want to be pampered”; Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley
Sir Chris Bryant would have the right to think that his birthdays are cursed. Five years ago, he went to see his GP on his birthday and found out he had stage three skin cancer.
Then, in January of this year, when he turned 62, the local hospital called and said that the cancer seemed to be back, only this time in his lung.
Instead to count their birthdays However, the ever-optimistic Labor MP, who has been jinxed, prefers to view this grim coincidence as luck.
“Jinxed? Yes, or very lucky,” he says. “If they hadn’t noticed this, I could have disappeared. I mean, I could still die, but not for long, I think.”
We're sitting in Sir Chris's office in Parliament, but we actually started this conversation in his constituency of Rhondda on January 12 , the day after he received news that his cancer had returned.
That day I left. to Wales to interview Sir Chris about his latest book, and while he drove me from the local train station to his home, he spoke to his specialist on the car's speakerphone, arranging a date for the biopsy that would later confirm that his right lung was indeed cancerous.
He was surprisingly optimistic at the time, telling me that, having suffered cancer five years earlier – “a complete blow to the stomach” – he was already contemplating death, while getting bad news the second time, he now says, “feels like, 'Oops!' fuck, okay, let's continue.
“And anyway, I kind of, you know, wanted to get over it quickly.”
Sir Chris, who lived in sunny Spain as a child, had a large melanoma removed from the back of his head in 2019, and They prescribed a course of immunotherapy drugs which seemed to cure her.
Sir Chris discovered a cancerous mole after a haircut in 2019 and had it removed her. Photo: Phil Harris
After five years of follow-up visits, he had his last body scan six months ago when doctors noticed a suspicious lump. It was later removed using robotic surgery, which involved inserting a probe into his body in five places. “I looked like I'd been shot,” he jokes.
Having undergone another course of immunotherapy, Sir Chris, who says the worst of his treatment is behind him, publicly announced his news this week. that he had lung melanoma (not lung cancer).
“Ten years ago this would have been a death sentence,” he says. “You probably have nine to 18 months to live, but we now have immunotherapy that helps your body destroy cancer cells.”
Because the treatment is still fairly new, it is difficult to give a reliable estimate of success rates, but Sir Chris says the best guess is a 70 per cent chance he will still be cancer-free in five years.
“I'm cancer-free at the moment and the plan is to stay that way,” he says. He faces two years of intravenous immunotherapy, 90 minutes every four weeks.
Since he made the announcement on social media this week, “I now know the health status of almost all members of Parliament,” he says. “Three MPs sent me pictures of moles and said, 'Do you think I should worry about this?' Other people tell me about how they or someone they know got skin cancer. I wonder how many people have experienced this.”
Going public, he says, was not an easy decision. “On the one hand, it’s a little vain – why should anyone care what happens to me? – but at the same time, there are really important messages about taking skin cancer seriously and getting moles checked.”
'I am inherently an optimist,' says Sir Chris Bryant, pictured in his Westminster office. Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley
One of the downsides for him is that people tell him to “be brave, be positive”, which he hates because: “It's just another one actually it's kind of a stumble on road. And I don't feel like death is in any sense inevitable.”
His husband Jared Cranney, the company secretary, fully aware of the MP's attitude, wisely asked him: “How much pampering do you want?”
“I said I didn't know pampering was on offer,” says Sir Chris. “I don’t want to be pampered, and I would be very bored sitting at home. I don't feel sick, I go to the gym and run, although sometimes you do feel a little run down.”
As matter-of-fact as he is about his cancer, it is clear that Sir Chris is not immune to mental stress. associated with the need to acknowledge one’s mortality.
“I do think about death a lot, although I wasn’t used to it before,” he says. “And dying is okay. You know, sooner or later it will happen, but I would prefer not to die sooner.
“I feel very full of life, and the most annoying thing about it is, especially with treatment, you end up just having to do it all the time think about your body.
Given her diagnosis, Rhondda's Labor MP is hungry for 'important messages'; about skin cancer in different countries Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley
“You have a little battle that Chris wants to still do everything, but actually sometimes you have to listen to your body telling Christopher that you really need to go and lie. down and sleep for half an hour.
He's also worried about fear: “People will think, 'Oh my God, he's going to die, so let's write him off,' and I think that's the same thing for a lot of people with cancer. It's very annoying because half the people in the country have lived with cancer at some point in their lives, and we all just have to grow up with cancer.”
Elected in 2001, he has spent the last 14 years in opposition and has no intention of slowing down just when the Labor Party is on the brink of power.
He is the shadow creative industries minister (and has a Pinewood Studios director's chair in his office with his name on the back to prove it) and says he will be “very upset if I don’t get to do this job in government.” .
Rumors that he wants to become the next Speaker are untrue (he has stood for the position before but thinks Sir Lindsay Hoyle will hold the chair for many years to come), but he says he could see himself still MP in 10 years, when he is over 70.
However, this will depend on him being re-elected twice more, something he refuses to do. as a matter of course.
He describes himself as “one of the party's most passionate opponents of complacency” who worked for former health secretary Frank Dobson in 1992 and was left in tears when a predicted Labor victory failed to materialize. come to fruition.
“Ironically, Rishi Sunak's talk of a hung parliament was a great message for us,” he says.
“I'm very good at building castles in the sky, because I am inherently an optimist, but the danger is that you make assumptions about what will happen, and in politics that is one of the stupidest things.”
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