The former Labour MP, now living with terminal cancer, has written a memoir of his colourful career. He talks about his faith, his contrarian spirit – and what he learned from his friend ‘Mrs T’
Frank Field thinks of his new book, Politics, Poverty and Belief, as his “death mask”. Partly because the memoir is his last word on the highly distinctive features of his singular, principled career. But also, awfully, because doctors told him that cancer would likely finish him before he finished it. When we met last week he was full of different emotions, but the principal one he expressed was perhaps blessed relief; that writer’s relief of having met his deadline, of having got it done.
We sit in the book-lined living room of the flat, on the top floor of the four-storey postwar block, half a mile from the House of Commons, that Field, now 80, has lived in since he first won his seat as Labour MP for Birkenhead in Liverpool in 1979. The cancer has affected his jaw and he finds it a struggle to talk, though the cheery determination of his voice is still very present. I ask him first, as you do, how he is.
