In the summer of 1962, the Tory party was in fretful mood. The days of “Supermac” were gone and to restore the lost gloss, prime minister Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his cabinet in the Night of the Long Knives on 13 July. Among the victims was the inflexible chancellor Selwyn Lloyd, the Philip Hammond of the day. To keep Selwyn quiet, Macmillan persuaded him to do a one-man roving inquiry into the state of the party in the country. I was whistled up from the Conservative Research Department (CRD) as a dogsbody to take notes, book tickets and bring in the tea.
We sat opposite each other in heatless first-class carriages as the train rumbled through endless snowscapes in the worst winter of the century: Selwyn in heavy black overcoat and paisley muffler reading Georgette Heyer with the book held up to his extravagantly flared nostrils.
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