It was while at Cambridge that he’d first become involved in the youth movement of the party he would later represent, initially in the Commons and then in Government. He was an enthusiastic convert to begin with, but on leaving university his first choice had not been a career in politics. He had taken up a lucrative job as a junior executive with a US-based company that built tractors in seventeen countries. During his ten years with that company he travelled widely, rising quickly in the firm, latterly establishing new plants in a number of African and Middle Eastern states.

At the age of thirty-three he had finally joined the party with which he had first flirted in his early twenties. A year later he was nominated as a parliamentary candidate for a safe constituency and was elected the following year with a majority of fifteen thousand. Almost from the start of his political career he had fallen under the influence of the party’s ageing chairman and guiding light of the previous thirty years, Lord Armsdale, becoming something of a protégé. Which had earned him both respect and influence.

It was obvious, even then, that he was destined for great things. He was appointed private secretary to the then leader of the opposition. During the next five years he gained experience in a number of important positions before finally winning his coveted post as Minister of State at the Foreign Office, shortly after his party won the general election. However, within a year of that appointment his mentor, Lord Armsdale, had suffered a coronary and was forced to retire from active political life. Many commentators seemed convinced at the time that Gryffe’s meteoric rise in the party would come to an end. Armsdale, they said in their columns, had been the real architect of his success. Without him to pull the strings Gryffe would slide back into obscurity. But he had proved them all wrong, not only by retaining his job but by extending his circle of influence, and expanding his status as a public figure. A populist, he seemed to have brought a breath of fresh air to the tarnished domain of British politics – a grey world bereft of character and charisma.

Even the commentators appeared to have been converted, and within two years they were describing him as the natural successor to his boss at the Foreign Office. Some even went so far as to predict that he might one day lead the party itself – a future prime minister.

Bannerman rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Gryffe had not only been an astute politician, but a manipulator of the media, climbing to political success initially on the back of the party’s former chairman, and then demonstrating to his critics that he could have done it on his own anyway.