The two elderly gentlemen in comfy chairs are myself and Chris Mullin in conversation about his latest volume of diaries and my biography of Harold Wilson. We’re at Durham for the first of my two literary festival appearances today.

Chris is always great fun to be around. As a government minister he was incapable of taking himself too seriously and you’d never know from his demeanour that Chris was responsible for uncovering one of the great legal miscarriages of justice of modern times (the Birmingham Six) or that he wrote one of the few successful novels to emerge from the imagination of a Member of Parliament (‘A Very British Coup’). Some audience members suggested we should tour the country as a double act.

I’m up for it!