Jess Phillips: What did you want to be when you were growing up?

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Jess Phillips said elsewhere, not written here

The prime minister.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 April 2018 source ↗

Others on this question

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Sally Lindsay

A radio journalist or on the till at Marks & Spencer.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 16 August 2025 source ↗

Dawn O’Porter

A drunk woman who threw epic dinner parties.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 15 August 2026 source ↗

Winston Churchill Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964

At the end he asked me if I would like to go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said 'Yes' at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. ... I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. However that may be, the toy soldiers turned the current of my life.

Recorded Chapter of his autobiography, written at Chartwell in 1930, Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), Project Gutenberg Canada, October 1930 source ↗

Shaznay Lewis English singer