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“It was late October 1951, the day after the general election,” he recalls with clarity. “A man on a bicycle found me, and said he had Number 10 Downing Street [the Prime Minister’s Office] on the telephone and Winston Churchill wanted to speak to me, so could I come, please. I thought it was a joke.”

Until then, the fledgling politician had spent little time in the House of Lords. He had inherited his father’s title of Baron Carrington (the family surname is spelt with one “r”, as is the title of his life peerage, Baron Carington of Upton) when only 19, but had not been allowed to sit in the House of Lords until the age of 21.

By that time he was serving with the Grenadier Guards, seeing action for the entire six years of the Second World War and being awarded the Military Cross for his role in the capture and holding of a strategically vital bridge at Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

As a relative newcomer to the House of Lords, he had not been hovering by his telephone the morning after Churchill led the Conservatives to victory.

“I thought I’d better go and answer that call, though,” he says, laughing. “And it was Churchill, offering me the lowliest position in his government: parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food. He said: ‘I hear you’ve been shooting partridges. Would you like to join my shoot?’ He was the loveliest man. Can you imagine any prime minister doing that today?”

Lord Carington, now a convivial 95, is the sole surviving member of Sir Winston Churchill’s last government (1951-1955). He had, he says, barely spoken to Churchill before that day, but for him, like so many Britons, the wartime leader – who died 50 years ago on Saturday – was already a legend.