She reportedly welled up when she mentioned his name in a candid interview with The Times Magazine, as she spoke about coping with the heartache brought about by his untimely death and said it “overshadowed everything” in her life.

She said: “Ivan dying is such a massive thing that everything else is irrelevant. It just overshadows everything. What goes on in the outside world becomes meaningless.

“Like anyone else in my situation, I just kept going. You have to deal with it, because you have no choice.”

Having left No 10, Samantha, 45, this week launched her own fashion range under the name Cefinn - the first and last letters of her surname and the middle four representing the names of her four children Elwen, Florence, Ivan and Nancy