This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Barry Huggins was elected Conservative MP for the Black Country constituency of Grimethorpe Central in 2017. At the General Election of 2019 he tripled his majority.
Five years later, the ease with which he saw off a strong challenge from the Reform Party was attributed to both the inflexibility of his opinions — as the political correspondent of The Times pointed out, he was “far more right-wing than his principal opponent” — and his status as a local man.
As his campaign literature put it, “Barry is Grimethorpe through-and-through. Born here, bred here and staying here.”
As well as being an indefatigable local champion, Barry, unusually for a Tory MP, has literary leanings. He read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy long before its author took to politics and, no partisan where books are concerned, was an admirer of the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson’s This Boy.
Each of these memoirs, as Barry remarked in interviews, “spoke to him”, for they chronicled a struggle against almost insuperable odds in which, fortified by luck, talent and persistence, self-made men were ultimately able to prevail.
Crisply written, and unsparing of detail, it gave notice of a tough childhood framed by grinding poverty
Barry saw himself as Vance and Johnson’s heir. Where they had gone, surely he could venture too? The result was Give My Regards to Sink Street — the thoroughfare in which Barry lived the first 13 years of his life — published in the spring of 2018 and serialised in the Daily Mail. Crisply written, and unsparing of detail, it gave notice of a notably tough childhood framed by grinding poverty yet redeemed by the affection of his parents (“mam” and “dad”) and its protagonist’s never-flagging desire to “make something of himself” and show certain unspecified “toffee-nosed gits” that a “lad from Sink Street could still get on”.
The book was a success: even the Guardian reviewer allowed that its account of the pre-teen Barry lying awake at night listening to the rats chewing up poison left for them in the drain outside his bedroom window was “poignant in the extreme”.
After Struggling Up, a sequel issued at the time of the first Covid lockdown, did even better, Barry was appointed to head up a government taskforce on social mobility. Alas, his own social mobility was shortly afterwards called into question when the Daily Mirror decided to interview a selection of his childhood friends.
Sink Street, one said “were quite posh in them days”. Barry’s dad, whom his son had presented as a manual labourer, was alleged to have worked as an insurance agent, whilst his mother was characterised as “a real Lady Muck”. Even the authenticity of Barry’s name was questioned: the records of Grimethorpe’s St Swithin’s Church revealed he had been christened “Barriemore”.
Barry fought back, claiming he achieved 11 Grade A GSCEs at “the worst school in Derbyshire”, only for a former friend to disclose that his parents had paid for him to have private tuition. It is all very sad, and with both his political and literary careers effectively stalled, Grimethorpe’s finest is thinking of taking a job on GB News.
