The authors were fortunate in being able to make good use of his diaries and other personal papers – over thirty boxes – at Churchill College, Cambridge. He left by the night ferry with his belongings crammed into tea chests, leaving the floors of his home in Belgravia littered with discarded clothes and possessions . When Heath formed his government in 1970, there was no place for Ernest Marples and he was relegated to the backbenches. Marples would only be liable for capital gains tax at 30% on the transfer to Vin which, as an offshore company, would only be liable for stamp duty at 2%. A series of scandals had dogged the Government, the Profumo Affair was the most famous, along with various espionage fiascos, when it seemed that most of the security services were working for Moscow.

It’s likely even without Beeching, with the rapid growth in road haulage and car ownership in the sixties, there would have been considerable cutbacks to the railways as they were making heavy losses and some lines were underused and losing too much money. He was however one of the first men in St Austell Cornwall to have a Volve 145 estate which he held onto thick and thin for many years. In car-centric Britain planners assumed that cycling was teetering on the edge of extinction, and by omission they would do all they could to hasten this demise.I remember someone suggested that if Boris Johnson had supported remain he would have been in a good position to replace David Cameron, who was hinting at standing down before the next general election. I found the book balanced and non-judgemental and it pays due tribute to Marples’ many achievements.

By his teenage years he had followed his father into the labour movement, and was earning money on the side by selling sweets and cigarettes to Manchester football crowds. He was then transferred to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, but went to the back benches in 1955 when Sir Anthony Eden became Prime Minister. At Housing (1951-1954) he delivered 300,000 new houses annually and as Postmaster General (1957-1959), he reformed Post Office accounting systems and launched postcodes and Subscriber Trunk Dialling. His subsequent report “ The Reshaping of British Railways” (commonly referred to as “Beeching’s Axe”) led to drastic cuts across the UK and the dismembering of many of Britain’s local and historic railway lines.

Unless at least one rationale is provided, the file will be deleted after Thursday, 1 February 2024. Following the scandalous “Profumo Affair”, Marples was caught up in the investigations which aimed to discover any wrongdoings in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. Marples had a hand in many other polices in addition to the railways, such as housing and pensions and was both Postmaster General and Minister of Transport. By 1964, the M6 linked the West Midlands and the North West, and the M4 and M5 had started their spidery progress in the Thames Valley and the West. I would say it was probably even stronger than an ordinary Mini, because of this complete ring structure it wasn’t a difficult exercise at all.