Here I am taking to the stage with Clare Clarke, my interviewer at our Saturday session of the Chiswick Book Festival.

We are here to discuss my biography of Harold Wilson. Clare is a brilliant facilitator who has interviewed me before and will be interviewing me again next month at Cheltenham. There I’ll be interviewed alongside Linda McDougall who has written a biography of Marcia Williams. The relationship between Harold and his political secretary features prominently in my book but not a single audience question about them came up in Chiswick. But Wilson’s role in keeping Britain out of the Vietnam war, his creation of the Open University and whether Kier Starmer has anything to learn from Wilson, did. The salacious stuff can wait for Cheltenham.