Todd tilts his head back and drains his mug. Pushing it to one side, his hand drifts to his neck and checks the knot of his tie is centred.

‘Shall we start?’

‘OK if I turn on the recorder?’ I take out my two Sonys – I always use a backup – and check the power and that the cassettes are at the start.

‘Yuh. Before we begin though, if I want to go off the record at any point, you’ll respect that, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’ The machine’s red light starts to flash. I open my notebook and scan an optimistic thirty questions. ‘If we can begin with –’

‘There’s a lot of myth about Labour and business,’ he interjects, before I can ask anything. He tips back his chair on two legs and gazes at a point on the wall behind my head. ‘Did you know stock markets actually perform much better when there’s a Labour government?’

I did. Most people in my line do. But it was a rhetorical question, so I don’t reply.

‘Yet everybody thinks that we’re somehow against business. Why is that?’

This time he wants an answer. ‘Pretty much every Labour government we’ve ever had has had to confront some kind of economic crisis. High inflation, excessive public borrowing, strikes, pressure on sterling – sooner or later the markets do you in. Denis Healey going cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout is the abiding image of incompetent Labour.’

The chair legs rap back on to the floor as he leans forward. ‘I know! And that was 1976, for goodness’ sake. Twenty years ago, and people still bring it up. They hold it against me!’ He shakes his head, as if marvelling at the injustice of the world. ‘This time it will be different. We will not bankrupt the country. As my friend Neville says – quite often, as you may have noticed – we are now the party of fiscal rectitude.’ He flashes a smirk, invisible to the tape recorder. I make a note of it. ‘We don’t want businesses to see us as the enemy. We want to be their partner, their friend.’

It’s a jarring moment. Here we are at his kitchen table, drinking coffee out of mismatched mugs. I can hear a child wailing upstairs and another one shouting something about a missing remote control. If it wasn’t for the tape recorder between us, we would look like a couple of North London dads chatting about football or schools. Instead, I am chronicling the shifting tectonic plates of British politics.

He seems to be enjoying the incongruity. His smile broadens. ‘We can achieve nothing unless business prospers and makes profits. Profits create jobs, jobs pay wages, and all that income generates taxes which pay for schools and hospitals. So here is something few, if any, Labour leaders have ever said: the bigger the profits made by business, the better.’