The man Labour has selected to stand against Boris Johnson at the next general election flings open the front door to his ex-council flat, welcomes me in and apologises for only having soya milk for the tea he’s made. I spill it all over his rug. “Oh, don’t worry,” says Danny Beales, “there’s been far worse spilled on that…”
His voice is gentle, low, and measured. He sits askew — awkwardly — in a chair in his living room because he pulled his back so badly he’s been to A&E and in agony for days, but is determined to keep going. This resolve amid pain or adversity – it transpires over several hours – is the story of his life. It’s one that bares so little resemblance to that of the former prime minister as to be almost a Dickensian study in divisions between rich and poor.
Yet, unless Johnson decides otherwise, he and Mr Beales, 34, will face each other, probably next year, in the seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, an outer west London constituency that voted Leave in the Brexit referendum.
More than 30 per cent of children in Uxbridge and South Ruislip were in poverty in 2020-21, according to Action for Children. Johnson enjoys a moderate 7,000 majority, but after the most staggering demise in contemporary British politics, from an 80-seat majority to a scandal-laden resignation in just three-and-a-half years, his personal brand is wounded. Rumours suggest he might flit off to a safe seat elsewhere in the country before Rishi Sunak calls the next election.
If he does, says Mr Beales, “It will confirm everything that people suspect: he isn’t interested in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, it was just a fast-track route to Parliament and No 10. It’s all about personal career, not about public service. And that he isn’t a man of conviction, values, and beliefs. If he jumped ship somewhere else it’s clearly about, ‘Actually I might lose this. I’m off.’ That’s cowardice.”
As we talk, however, it seems Mr Beales is not interested in the Boris Show, or the dramatic prospect of him losing his seat. Not for the sake of it, anyway.
“I felt this frustration, this anger, really, that things aren’t working as they should do, and we need a change of government,” says Beales, explaining why he applied to his party, after seven years as a local councillor, to be selected as a parliamentary candidate. “We need more people in politics who understand what life is like at the moment. That was my driving factor. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, that Boris Johnson is standing there! I want to be against him!’”
But the swipes, however carefully executed, continue. When news of Mr Johnson’s memoir broke, he tweeted it will be “a work of fiction from start to finish”. And today he says, “Uxbridge and South Ruislip deserve a full-time MP.” Mr Beales recently joked on Twitter about Mr Johnson’s “annual trip to his constituency”.
When i asked Johnson’s office in Uxbridge how many surgeries he has personally held in the past six months — since he resigned as prime minister — they did not provide an exact answer to the question, merely saying it was “regular”. The register of parliamentary interests shows Mr Johnson earned over £750,000 in November alone by giving speeches at corporate events, and has earned over £1m since resigning as prime minister.
“What I’ve heard knocking on doors is people saying he’s not visible,” says Beales. “People joke with me that he appears for his annual walk down Uxbridge High Street, waves, gets in a car, drives off. It’s not clear he’s doing advice surgeries. One of the great bits about British politics is how accessible politicians always have been.”
Mr Beales wants to uphold that tradition. He was born in one of the local hospitals — Hillingdon — and attended local schools, growing up as the only child of parents who met while working in Budgens, the supermarket, and divorced when he was a toddler.
Soon after, his parents lost their house in the negative equity crisis of the early 90s. After the split, his father was present “occasionally but not significantly” he says, leaving his mother to struggle as a single parent while “saddled with debt”.
“My life has been shaped predominantly by my mum, who was like my two parents, and my grandparents,” he says. “My nan childminded for me when my mum was at work. My mum went out and worked and she did sometimes two jobs. She worked incredibly hard.” This included working in a funeral director’s, above which they lived when Mr Beales was 15.
It has already been reported that Mr Beales experienced homelessness as a teenager, but only now does he reveal what happened, what that means, and how it shaped him.
“My mum lost her job,” he says. “We couldn’t afford the rent, there was no chance of a council property, so we were homeless.” They got in the car, drove up to Northampton and stayed with his grandparents for a while. Soon after, they moved into shared rented accommodation, but his mother lost her job again, so they couldn’t afford the rent there either. “This time the council offered us a bed and breakfast hostel.” It was the last year of his GCSEs.
More on Labour Party
“Everyone was homeless there,” he says. He and his mother had a room each — a legal requirement because of his age. “It was quite rough. I remember the police raided — a drugs raid — at one point. And so my mum was like, [whispers], ‘Just stay in my room’.”
They shared a bathroom with other residents. “We had a hob, like a little cooking plate. And we could use the laundry facilities downstairs if we needed to. But it was really expensive so my mum would ask friends or go to the launderette because it was cheaper.”
At the time, he hid his homelessness from friends at school. “I remember pretending to walk a different way home and then circling back when my friends had gone, down the lane to the hostel. I felt a bit ashamed, to be honest,” he says. “I felt embarrassed. I felt angry that my mum was in that position — that people were in that position.” It still infuriates him how much the hostel was charging people just to wash their clothes.
They lived there for a few months before eventually being given a council flat. “We were on the edge of town, it was rough and ready. We didn’t have carpet or wallpaper. Bare walls, bare floors. No furniture. We didn’t have anything. We just slept on the floor together on a duvet, because we didn’t have a bed or a mattress for a period.” Eventually, a charity donated some furniture, including a sofa and a table.
Mr Beales was extremely close to his mother, and despite the circumstances, they didn’t row, and instead tried to find joy in the absence of anything much at all. “I remember Superman-ing on the bed, where you lift someone up with your legs and you pretend you’re Superman. I remember doing that a lot in the hostel.”
For a long time, he says, he didn’t talk about this to anyone, but in the past few years, he’s begun to be more open and “now it’s people’s everyday experience: not having heating, not having electricity, people are a lot more exposed to food banks.”
The more he talks, the more tense Beales seems; in part to protect his mother’s dignity, but also because he doesn’t want anything of this to define him. “Sometimes people almost glorify poverty,” he says. “I want to stop it. And that’s what’s driven me.”
It has become a cliché to accuse politicians of being “out of touch”; that their personal experience or even knowledge of poverty is so absent as to make them unqualified to represent the most vulnerable (When Johnson was 15, he was attending Eton, the most famous and expensive boarding school in the country).
But what is rarely described is the cascade of poverty; how it reduces hope and removes opportunities, how it endangers people, and how the smallest problem can grow. “If your washing machine breaks and you’re on a really low income,” he says, “these kind of unexpected expenditures can completely derail you.”
In Beales’ case, when his mother’s car was stolen, she couldn’t replace it. “It was absolutely disastrous,” he says. She had to walk for miles through an industrial estate in Northampton to get to work. “One winter, it was really icy and she slipped and broke her back.”
She broke it in two places, had to have surgery, and was off work for months. “I’ve never been one who believes that money makes you happy. But I’ve always believed that poverty makes you unhappy. And it makes you unhealthy and unable to be resilient to the shocks that we all face in life.”
While all this was happening, Mr Beales was contending with something else momentous: realising he was gay. He had seen how gay people were treated. Before he left Uxbridge for Northampton, while at a school in Hillington in his early teens, a fellow pupil had come out, only to be viciously bullied, verbally and physically, serving as a warning to Mr Beales. It shut him up — and it sounds, shut him down — for years. He was already contending with enough for any teenager. “I was overweight, had a lot of abuse for my hair [being red], didn’t have many friends. I remember being really unhappy at that point.”
He now sees that his mental health wasn’t good, but at the time didn’t understand that, only that he felt what most LGBT kids do: isolation. That, he says, was even worse than the homelessness.
His family always thought of him as “bookish”, but his mother always knew there was more. She asked him three times before he confirmed her instinct. “She said, ‘Well, I knew. You knew I knew.’ Which is very like her. She said, ‘it doesn’t change anything. I love you wherever you are, whatever you do.”
Mr Beales was 17 at the time, dating a man a few years older, whom he’d met in town. He used to sneak off to the local gay pub. “It was amazing,” he says with a grin. “£15 for all you can drink!” He has since campaigned as a councillor to secure the future of LGBT venues in his current constituency in Camden.
More on UK Politics
But how did he feel in himself, walking into a gay bar at 17?
“I wasn’t very confident. Now people say I appear so confident. But I’m quite introverted, quite shy. In politics you don’t have much choice [but to be an extravert]. But I had low self-esteem. I was quite an overweight kid, and ginger, and wore glasses. And left-handed.” At one point, his dentist said he needed braces. “I said to my mum, ‘I can’t have braces too!’”
He barely had money for clothes — not ideal when trying to feel confident at a gay bar. The £30-a-week he’d receive from the Education Maintenance Allowance he would give to his mother to help with bills or the weekly shop. Occasionally, he would be able to go to Peacock’s, the low-cost clothing shop, to buy a top, but that was his only indulgence.
But it was during this period in the hostel and then the council flat that his political awareness was born: seeing the problems around him, and the desire to change them. He joined the Labour Party and later became the first in his family to go to university, where he studied politics. After that he worked several jobs to fund a master’s degree in social policy, moved to London, and worked for an MP.
In the past couple of years, he became head of policy and campaigns at the National Aids Trust (NAT), the HIV charity. It was NAT who took NHS England to the High Court after it refused to make PrEP, the drug that prevents HIV, available on the NHS. Since being forced to do so, PrEP has drastically reduced HIV transmission rates, therefore saving the NHS tens of millions in the long-term. But PrEP did something else for many people, including gay men. It shrunk the 40-year terror of HIV.
Has Mr Beales taken PrEP? “Yep,” he says.
Other MPs and parliamentary candidates have revealed that they’re HIV positive, but none have so far disclosed taking this medication. “It’s an amazing thing. The fact that there’s this one little pill that’s peanuts financially that completely prevents someone’s chance of getting HIV? The fact that we’ve got to the point where people living with HIV are undetectable [where the virus is reduced by medication to levels that are unmeasurable] and so they can’t pass the virus on? That’s incredible.”
But, he points out, many people, in particular women, aren’t accessing PrEP in nearly the numbers they could. (Women, as i reported last year, are more likely to be diagnosed late with HIV, endangering their health much more). When I ask if Mr Beales is a feminist he says, “Yeah, I think I am.” His intonation suggests it isn’t that he’s unsure of his belief in equality but whether he has the right to call himself a feminist.
“My life has been shaped by a series of amazing women, whether it’s my mum, my nan, the teachers who particularly supported me, or the people I’ve worked for,” he says. “Growing up with a single mother, seeing and hearing from all of them you get a sense of how gendered society still is, how tough it is to be a woman, whether that’s violence toward women and girls or gendered workplaces, pay disparities – wherever you look.”
When asked to name three of his political heroes, the first two he mentions are women — Stella Creasy MP (who successfully campaigned for years against payday loans) and Lisa Nandy MP. What would he like to see Labour do for women?
“The fact that there isn’t suitable, good quality childcare particularly affects women and working families, and needs addressing [with] a national childcare service that’s funded, and genuinely affordable,” he says.
But then stops and adds, “The conversation fundamentally needs to be led by women themselves. It’s not for me to dictate what women do or don’t need. But far too many women in my life have been touched by violence. How do we change that?” Should Labour win the next election, Beales wants to see a national strategy on violence and sexual violence against women and girls to “address it, measure it, and eliminate it”.
As we sit in his modest flat in Kentish Town, north London, outside rows are raging about transgender rights, with the Westminster Government blocking Scotland’s attempts to reform the gender recognition process. Beales wants to cool the debate.
“I think trans people’s existence, right to services and healthcare is a human right,” he says. “I don’t personally view women’s rights and trans rights as incompatible. But I don’t think it’s helpful to ratchet up the anger on either side. You can’t solve this debate on social media.” Instead, from conversations he’s had with trans people, he believes improving access to healthcare is more important, more urgent than legal changes.
More on Boris Johnson
Soon, Mr Beales will move back to Uxbridge and South Ruislip. The issues facing people there, he says, are clear. “People on the doorstep feel worse off, feel that life is tougher, that everything seems to be at breaking point, and that’s what I’ll continue to talk about: the cost of living. I open doors to Conservatives saying, ‘My mortgage has just gone up 500-£600 a month. My wage hasn’t gone up for however many years. What the hell do I do?’ Fuel bills are also much talked about, and childcare costs. Direct decisions that the Conservative Government have made, have all made us poorer.”
One of the central problems in Britain is housing — something he knows from personal experience, but, I say, the last Labour government failed to fix it, failed to stop house prices rocketing and failed to build enough social or affordable housing.
“Any government can always do more, do better,” he says, “On rough sleeping, Labour did some amazing stuff, there was a decline in rough sleeping in stark contrast to where we’ve got to.” But under Labour, homelessness began to become invisible – exactly the kind of families-in-B&Bs situation he experienced.
Mr Beales agrees. “In dealing with the more drastic end of the housing situation, [we were] not making enough progress on the [housing] supply and the causes.” Will Labour commit to a mass council house building programme? For that, he says, we’ll need to wait for their manifesto.
The question for him now, though, is can he turn Uxbridge and South Ruislip red? “I think it’s really tough but it’s possible,” says Mr Beales. He talks of a voter he met in the constituency. “He said to me, I’ve voted Conservative my entire life, I call myself a Tory, I feel like a Tory, but I just don’t know if I can vote for this.”
“This”, he gestures, refers not only to the current Sunak Government but also to Liz Truss and the man before her. “We can’t underestimate Boris Johnson,” says Mr Beales. “He’ll be a tough, tough competitor — if he stands.”