The dominant sound on the tape of my interview with Alan Johnson is his laugh. This loud rattle has always been part of his personality, encouraging the popular view that he is a rare human among the aliens on Planet Westminster – but was perhaps surprising as we were talking on Thursday morning, with the political establishment braced for a Ukip surge in local and European polls that injects further uncertainty into the outcome of next year's general election.
Johnson, though, can be excused his high good humour. At 64 and in the declining phase of his legislative career, the Labour member for Hull West and Hessle had just won two literary prizes in three days – the £3,000 Orwell prize following the £10,000 Ondaatje prize – for his first book. This Boy describes a1950s childhood in west London as the son of a single mother who died young, leaving him in the care of his sister. Linda, dedicatee and hero of This Boy, effectively became a substitute mum, turning up at parents' evenings, although only a schoolgirl herself and, as he recalls, "berating my teachers about Alan's maths needing to be better".
A mantelpiece now crowded with literary prizes, I suggested, might make Johnson the Hilary Mantel of Westminster? That cackle of his, and then, "Well, that's one way of putting it," although he confirms his new, bookish kudos byadding: "Actually, Hilary wrote me avery nice letter about the book."
This rush of success continues an extraordinary transformation since, inJanuary 2011, Johnson resigned as shadow chancellor, distracted from politics by the messy end of his second marriage. He seemed doomed at that time to the common political endgame of front-page embarrassment followed by backbench oblivion.
So is it a shock to have achieved in ayear the sort of recognition many authors never get? "Um, it's a delightful shock. I was arrogant enough to think, from early on, that I was writing something people were going to appreciate. And everyone I showed it to – agents, publishers and so on – seemed to agree. But it's a leap from that to prizes and the kind of critical acclamation it got. There was actually only one bad review, which was in Newsline, the paper of the Workers' Revolutionary party. The headline was: From London Slum toImperial Minister. Dear old WRP!"
His magnificent post-imperial corner office in Parliament Street, its windows like televisions tuned to close-ups of theHouse of Commons, is personalised with memorabilia relating to Queens Park Rangers, photos of two dead family cats, souvenir ministerial boxes from hisperiods as a secretary of state (Education and Health for Blair, Home Office for Brown), and, more incongruously, aplastic figurine of Margaret Thatcher with a nut-cracker between her legs. "That was a present from a spad [special political adviser]. I thought it was a bit vulgar, actually."
His own nuts are currently being cracked by his publisher, which has scheduled for September a second volume that is still 20,000 words short of completion. Please, Mr Postman picks up the story at the age of 18, when Johnson got a job delivering letters, and ends in his late 30s, when a career as a union official began his move into politics. Heexpects to write at least one more memoir which, like the first two, will benamed after a song by his beloved Beatles: "I suppose Paperback Writer will be hard to resist, eventually."
One of the most striking lines in thefirst book comes after his mother's death, when he observes: "My inability to cry nagged at me." Had the tears finally come while writing the book? "Yeah, there were a few times. Notsobbing crying, but there was amoisturearound."
He insists, though, that, unlike some who experience life crises, he suffered no kind of breakdown. "No, I didn't suffer depression. It was a difficult time,obviously, the domestic issues. But, onthe other hand, the lifting ofthat burden of work: I'd been aminister for11 years, and then ashadowminister, and I hated that, after being in power. SoI suddenly hadtime and went away and read [Thackery's] Vanity Fair, but the hero iscalled George Osborne, so Ithought I'd picked the wrong book there."
One of the side-effects of This Boy's success has been invitations to review books, including a recent Guardian assignment on John Campbell's biography of Roy Jenkins, another Labour home secretary with a side-line in prize-winning writing. Discussing the way inwhich a Welsh miner's son became a grandee of both the British and Brussels political establishments, Johnson calledJenkins "an apple who fell a fairdistance from the tree". Was that aself-knowing reference from aLondon orphan and former postman who endedup as a triple secretary of state and best-selling author?
"Um, what I meant about Roy was theway he took on all these mannerisms and gestures. He lived in Ladbroke Square. My mum used to clean houses in Ladbroke Square … "
That he became – in class terms – someone else? Whereas you neverhave?
"Well, I don't think I have. You don't have a working-class income anymore, but you are what you are born into, Ithink. Whereas Roy went out deliberately to change it."
But can someone like you stay working class?
"You certainly can. Whether you haveis a different question. John Prescott famously said we're all middleclass now."
Are you middle class?
"I don't feel middle class, in that sense. I suppose I now call lunch 'lunch' and not dinner. Someone asked me at the Orwell prize presentation if I felt outof place among those sort of people. And I don't have a chip on my shoulder or anything like that, but I admire theway they operate and the wide networks they have of people they know from school and university. And so sometimes you feel you've dropped in from adifferent planet. I felt it as aminister: those conversations about whether someone got a first or a2:1fromCambridge."
So hasn't Johnson, then, fallen a fair distance from the tree in the sense that his political and literary careers are an unlikely outcome from the start he describes in This Boy? "Yeah. Except that what I'm trying to get across – and even more so in the second book – is that, among the people I grew up and worked with, there was extraordinary unused talent. It was Gray's Elegy: 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air.' I used to get frustrated. I was acabinet minister in five different departments, and no newspaper ever asked me for my recommended summer holiday reading; no one ever asked meto review a book until I published abook. I did feel that I was categorised: 'Didn't go to university? Go and stand over there.'"
However many memoirs he writes, heinsists that there will never be a book – Beatles-inspired title Get Back – about a Westminster resurrection, definitively ruling out ever running for the party leadership, the London mayoralty, or taking a ministerial job. There may, though, be external and internal pressure to return to the political frontline because Johnson is widely held to possess a warmth and normality that Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband lack. Is that a fair criticism of them? "It's unfair to see a lack of warmth in Ed Miliband because, as leader of the opposition, youget very little chance to show that."
But, as you know, people say that you "connect" with theelectorate in a way that other politicians don't.
"People do say it about me. But I just do what I do. When I was in government, though, I was very disciplined. Iwasn't this free agent, saying what Ithink, because no one can be. Nigel Farage can, because he hasn't got any policies, or a proper party."
Johnson refuses to accept the common view that, with Miliband performing worse than hoped and Ukip better, Labour is in crisis. "I don't think so at all. I think that coming back from defeat in 2010 and turning it round after one term in opposition would be an extraordinary achievement."
As that answer assumes that Labour will win power next May, it becomes clear that the admirable equanimity ofhis account of a forbidding childhood may be part of a broader tendency towards optimism. Probably uniquely inhis party, Johnson speaks loyally andkindly about both Milibands, Brownand Blair.
"I was knocking on doors yesterday inHull and a woman came out who wasa huge believer in Tony. He's got alot more support out there than peoplerealise."
Do you still see him at his varioushouses?
"Haven't seen him for a while. He sent me a nice email about the book. He said: 'I think you missed your vocation.' He appointed me to three cabinet jobs, so I wasn't sure how to take that!"
He roars again, that big warm laugh that we can now apparently rule out being heard on a Labour leadership orLondon mayoral hustings. If Alan Johnson were ever to write a memoir ofthe current phase of his life – obvious title, When I'm Sixty Four – it would bean improbably jaunty volume from aman who, only three years ago, seemed to be in public and private ruin.
