But when he stood up to speak, he found that his carefully wrought sentences suddenly seemed unreal. His audience clearly felt the same, and he could sense that the fifty or sixty MPs in the chamber were only half listening. He suffered a moment of panic: how could he be boring about a subject that mattered so profoundly to the people he represented?

On the government front bench he could see his mother, now Minister for Schools, and his Uncle Billy, Minister for Coal. Billy Williams had started work down the pit at the age of thirteen, Lloyd knew. Ethel had been the same age when she began scrubbing the floors of Tŷ Gwyn. This debate was not about fine phrases, it was about their lives.

After a minute he abandoned his script and spoke extempore. He recalled instead the misery of working-class families made penniless by unemployment or disability, scenes he had witnessed first hand in the East End of London and the South Wales coalfield. His voice betrayed the emotion he felt, somewhat to his embarrassment, but he ploughed on. He sensed his audience beginning to pay attention. He spoke of his grandfather and others who had started the Labour movement with the dream of comprehensive employment insurance to banish forever the fear of destitution. When he sat down there was a roar of approval.

In the visitors’ gallery his wife Daisy smiled proudly and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

He listened to the rest of the debate in a glow of satisfaction. He felt he had passed his first real test as an MP.

Afterwards, in the lobby, he was approached by a Labour Whip, one of the people responsible for making sure MPs voted the right way. After congratulating Lloyd on his speech, the Whip said: ‘How would you like to be a parliamentary private secretary?’

Lloyd was thrilled. Each minister and secretary of state had at least one PPS. In truth a PPS was often little more than a bag-carrier, but the job was the usual first step on the way to a ministerial appointment. ‘I’d be honoured,’ Lloyd said. ‘Who would I be working for?’

‘Ernie Bevin.’

Lloyd could hardly believe his luck. Bevin was Foreign Secretary and the closest colleague of Prime Minister Attlee. The intimate relationship between the two men was a case of the attraction of opposites. Attlee was middle class: the son of a lawyer, an Oxford graduate, an officer in the First World War. Bevin was the illegitimate child of a housemaid, never knew his father, started work at the age of eleven, and founded the mammoth Transport and General Workers Union. They were physical opposites, too: Attlee slim and dapper, quiet, solemn; Bevin a huge man, tall and strong and overweight, with a loud laugh. The Foreign Secretary referred to the Prime Minister as ‘little Clem’. All the same they were staunch allies.

Bevin was a hero to Lloyd and to millions of ordinary British people. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more,’ Lloyd said. ‘But hasn’t Bevin already got a PPS?’