Alan Johnson’s third memoir covers his political career and includes the sudden death of his pregnant daughter, Natalie, which he can hardly bear to discuss

Alan Johnson was abandoned by his drunk and abusive father at the age of eight and effectively orphaned four years later when his mother died. He grew up with his sister in a Notting Hill council house, surviving on stale bread and Oxo. Although he was a bright boy who passed the 11-plus, he left school at 15 and got a job stacking shelves at Tesco before becoming a postman. But he has never been chippy or self-pitying about his background. “In the inverted world of the Labour Party it makes me aristocracy,” he says with a smile.

For his party’s moderates, AJ is the great leader Labour never had. Now 66, the former home secretary is an elder statesman with a boyish charm who