“He believed in individual choice exercised through the market place, and that people must accept the consequences of the choices they made ... At the same time he was well aware that there were many people who needed protection from the unintended but indisputable negative aspects of a market economy” such as unemployment, financial hardship in illness, and lack of access to the essentials of life if certain market prices rose to unaffordable levels.

This was the belief of Peter Thorneycroft, an unjustly forgotten UK Conservative party politician prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, summarised by Stanley Crooks in a belated and well merited biography (George Mann Publications, £25), enlivened by some of Thorneycroft’s own engaging sketches and watercolours.