Mother's broken dreams cloud a politician's hard upbringing

**This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson**

**Bantam Press, €21.40**

**Reviewed by Brendan Daly**

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British MP Alan Johnson held senior cabinet positions in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Johnson's startling memoir, however, never even refers to his political career. Instead, This Boy recounts his childhood and adolescence, a period dominated by the dissolution of his family in the slums of post-war London.

In 1957, as Britain ...