A senior Labour MP broke down with emotion during a TV interview as he spoke about his father's death from alcoholism.
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth had to pause to wipe away tears during a TV interview to be broadcast tomorrow.
"I had a difficult time growing up," he told GB News host and former Labour MP Gloria De Piero - explaining his father's drinking problem had led to his parents' divorce when he was five.
By his teenage years, he described, Mr Ashworth spent each week "bouncing" between his parents.
His father was a pit boss at Manchester's Playboy Casino in its 1970s heyday - where he met his mother, who was a Bunny Girl.
Speaking fondly of his father, who died in 2010, aged just 61, "He was sort of a great character.
"I loved being in his company but he just couldn't help but allow himself to be gripped by drink and alcohol."
At his lowest ebb, Mr Ashworth said his father had would drink a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey a day.
He recalled visiting his father in hospital "at six, seven, something like that...and I didn't really understand what's happening at the time, but subsequently, I learned that doctors basically said to him you're going to die unless you pack the drinking in.
"He didn't pack the drinking any, but he moved from Whiskey ... to white wine and then, throughout my childhood, the fridge would always be full of these big bottles of cheap white wine from the off licence.
"There were times when that was all that was in, all, that was in the fridge."
Mr Ashworth's father told him out of the blue at the age of 58 that he was moving to Thailand.
"By this point I'm working for Gordon Brown," he said. "Every now and again I'd get a Thai number would come up my phone and my dad ringing me from Thailand, drunk."
In the summer of 2010, he said, his father had booked a ticket to return home to see his son get married.
But he cancelled two days before the wedding, saying "I'm not coming. I'm not coming."
"I was so angry with him. I said, oh fine, you do what you want them and I didn't speak to him," Mr Ashworth said.
"I was so furious at the wedding day, I didn't speak to him. Couldn't speak to him on the day.
"And, um. Two months later, he was dead."
He went on: "I subsequently heard from the friends, the llittle group, that he felt he couldn't come to the wedding because he thought he would embarrass me in front of my posh friends. Because he thought he’d get so drunk that I'd be ashamed of him.
"Because at that wedding would have been, you know, Gordon Brown and other Labour MPs and journalists, you know people who work in Westminster.
"People who, to him, he would think were posh, because they went to university and talk in clever ways. Use long words and have fancy jobs.
"He felt he couldn't come because he would embarrass me. He was my dad. So I wanted him."
