He will be remembered for all these things, and I would suggest that some future party may have to implement his works, just to pay old age pensions. In his memoir he ascribes some of that freedom to speak his mind to the fact that he had never had a partner or family to worry about. “Many of the cabinet were anxious about their mortgages or supporting their kids,” he says. “Ministerial salaries were worth keeping if you could.” His right against the hard left momentum tribe took some guts, as did his fight against anti-semitism. He seems suddenly wearied by the complications of that debate. “I’m getting a bit tired,” he says, “perhaps a couple more questions.”

Politics, Poverty and Belief is an implicit indictment of modern British politics - the world of cash for questions, Partygate and all the rest - in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. Despite me hanging on now, it doesn’t look likely I’m going to see it,” he says drily. “Thank God, I don’t think about it. It would only make me depressed. For now, I’m having a really nice time doing a lot of reading.” It didn’t make explaining politics any easier. In my book I question how big Christianity was to me. People who observed me say that it’s very important to me. I say, I just got on without thinking about it.It was jolly nice being in the Lords, but given my previous oath to Queen Elizabeth included her successor, I couldn’t understand it.” When he came up against the Militant tendency in Birkenhead, he recognised the bullying and knew to stand up to it. It was the same with Momentum, which took over the constituency party and tried to have him deselected after Corbyn became leader in 2015. It was eventually because of his belief that “Jeremy Corbyn was cultivating a national tolerance of the thuggery that we were experiencing locally from Momentum activists”, that he resigned the whip. Yes,” he says. “Most of my life, I’ve been on the outside, although I often longed to be on the inside. But I mean, in cabinet subcommittees I would take on Gordon [Brown] and nobody else would. I remember on one occasion we were talking about pensions and I kept saying to Gordon: ‘Where’s your paper on this?’” He grunts a funny impression of Brown’s towering umbrage. “Nobody else spoke up. I realised that they knew Gordon would just do ’em later.” It was his first time in Parliament in two years and he was cheered loudly, but found the experience a bit pointless. Field has spent his life fighting poverty in Britain, and has found allies on all sides of the political spectrum. In this book, Field talk about his activism, his foundational work with the Child Poverty Action Group and his work passing legislation for the Minimum Living Wage. He explains why he has dedicated his life to speaking out against the corruption of greed and power and writes with great alacrity about the titans of his political age, including Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. In the end, Field's zeal for reform was too much for too many people, and, in 2015, he was deselected by his own local Labour party.

So it came to a disastrous end. I was really disappointed that I never learned to play an instrument to a high level. That would have been brilliant.” I developed a sort of friendship with Mrs T, although I don’t know if you can call it friendship, with the leader of another party,” Frank says when we discuss his motivation for going to see her privately shortly before she was finally ousted from office in late November that year. Field ran unsuccessfully against Labour in 2019, as the sole candidate of the Birkenhead Social Justice party. He doesn’t dwell on how his 40 years as an MP ended. “It’s strange, I just got on straight away,” he says. “I thought I could have been overwhelmed with despair but I wasn’t.” Indeed, he would regularly pop into Downing Street during the Eighties and was one of the last people to see the PM the night before her resignation.His faith must often have been challenged? Blair used me, which was OK. I was perfectly happy to be used No, he didn’t talk about [belief] to me. If I sent something I’d written to him, he would say, ‘Of course, I agree with a lot of this, Frank.’ But he wouldn’t be specific. I don’t suppose he bothered to read it.” He found “protection and belonging” in church. Field shouldn’t be understood as dogmatically Left or Right but as a Christian, a detail he tended to omit from speeches. He studied and admired Idealism, the school of thought that worried Britain was losing its moral compass – so it sought new, more popular ways to transmit religious teaching via social activism. For Field, this meant joining the Labour Party. In the increasingly dirty world of British politics, one man has stood out for unimpeachable integrity - the former Labour Member of Parliament for Birkenhead, Frank Field. The trouble with politics as he sees it is that no political party will give the perfect fit, “particularly when there are only two-and-a-half of them. What you do is find the best fit possible”.