The ceiling crashed on the bed in which Tebbit and his wife were sleeping. Two weeks before Indira Gandhi was shot dead, an IRA bomb intended for Thatcher went off at The Grand Brighton Hotel in the middle of the night. Tebbit is no stranger to assassination attempts. “Both the mother and son were of course murdered.” Rajiv was an airline pilot and so we had a lot in common,” he recalls. The next day, I met Rajiv and Sonia in the garden of the mission. She had concluded that the reforms we were carrying out in UK were also needed in India. I was warned by the high commissioner in Delhi that she can sometimes scarcely exchange a word, but she was very open and interesting. “It was January 1984 when I met Mrs Gandhi. He travelled to India first as a pilot and later as a politician, and met Indira, Rajiv, and Sonia Gandhi.

He might have been prime minister too, but he chose not to run because of his wife’s poor health. He was the working-class boy who went on to become a pilot for British Airways, a Member of Parliament, and a close associate of Thatcher’s. Tebbit continues to have a large number of critics, political and cultural, and is still in news for his controversial comments against gay marriage. “A funny man, but I wouldn’t trust him to organise the proverbial piss-up at a brewery. “I love (prominent Brexiteer and former foreign secretary) Boris Johnson’s company,” he says. His family is well-integrated in this country.” As Britain muddles through Brexit, Tebbit remains a firm supporter of Leave, even though he does believe it could have been handled better. And he does say he isn’t religious in conventional sense of the word.

Tebbits