John Attlee is preparing to retire from the House of Lords before Labour forces him out in the final purge of the hereditary peers. The third viscount is the last direct male descendant of Clement Attlee, whose transformative post-war government is the model against which all subsequent Labour administrations have been measured and, for many in the party, considered to have disappointed.

“I am the only son of an only son,” John told me over afternoon tea at the Lords. Unlike his grandfather, whom he strikingly resembles and calls Clem, he is a Conservative (although he prefers the label “Tory”). He has no children, and so the earldom will end with him. “It’s very sad. I’ve got a lovely wife, but my first marriage and that side of my life didn’t work out.”

John served in the Territorial Army and the influence of his military training is apparent in his bearing. He is only 68 but his accent, courtesy and manner are redolent of a lost, more formal era - the era of the provincial businessman, the family doctor, the trusted suburban bank manager, the bowler-hatted commuter. His grandfather set up a trust fund to pay for his education from what he earned on what John described as “ghastly” (a favourite word) speaking tours of America. John attended a “ghastly” prep school on the south coast, which he loathed and refused to name. “I was teased for being a socialist and I didn’t even know what a socialist was.” He was happier at Stowe, although conscious of the family wealth of some of his fellow pupils, but was hindered by dyslexia. He did not go to university. “I was a very late developer, and they thought I was only fit to do woodwork.”

The family name was a source of pride and a burden for his father, Martin, the second viscount. “Being prime minister’s son is the worst position on God’s earth. It really is. If you’re thinking about being the prime minister, you’re going to have to think of what’s going to be affecting your children. Keir Starmer has been very good at keeping his children hidden. You’ve got to be so careful. Because if you’re successful, like Euan Blair, it’s only because of your father. If you’re not so successful, you are done - because you’re trying to compete with a superstar. Because all prime ministers are superstars you know.”

Even Liz Truss?

He laughed. “I knew you’d say that! What I’m trying to say is that my father was very good. He had good social skills, good writing skills. But he had weaknesses as well. He smoked and drank too much and made a lot of mistakes.”

John is considered a diligent, independently minded parliamentarian, adept at tabling amendments to bills and working with Labour and Liberal Democrat peers, even to inflict defeat on his own party if necessary. He is known affectionately in the house as “wheels” because of his connections in the automotive trade (he is president of the Heavy Transport Association). With the TA he served on a tour of Bosnia in the early 1990s, and worked for many years for Smith Industries, an engineering business. He later ran an NGO in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 2004 genocide.

He inherited his seat following the death of his father, who served in the merchant navy, in 1992 and for his first five years in the house sat as a crossbencher. He joined the Conservatives only a few months before the 1997 general election. “I bought in at the bottom of the market. Things were going quite nicely with the economy [under John Major], two and half per cent growth a year, but it was the sleaze that did for us.”

With characteristic humility, he says he had “no background in politics” when he entered the Lords. “I had only the knowledge of affairs that you’d expect of the average person. I had no political convictions at all. I kept coming in every day and was told that conventions are much more important than the rules.”

His father had abandoned Labour when “it went through its loony left phase” and joined the SDP, “which suited him very well. As the son of a Labour PM, he could never have gone to the Tories.”

John thought differently. As he began to understand politics, he realised that he was an instinctive Tory. “What do you want to change – that’s the interesting question. I like sound money, public standards, the status quo. What did we get in government? An out-of-control budget, immigration out of control, disloyalty to leaders, low standards.”

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Clement Attlee was a socialist but also what John calls a small “c” conservative who revered the institutions of the British state. For Attlee, there was no contradiction between his radicalism and his conservatism. He was proud of his public school (which presumably he never described as ghastly), Haileybury and Imperial Service College near Hertford in Hertfordshire, founded by the East India Company, and savoured his undergraduate years at University College, Oxford, writing about them in his autobiography, As it Happened (1954), with a kind of romantic nostalgia that Evelyn Waugh would have recognised.

He enlisted in the First World War at the age of 31, saying, “It was my duty.” He served at Gallipoli and was later wounded at the Battle of Hanna in Mesopotamia - shot in the buttocks while carrying the flag of his regiment, the South Lancashires. He remained a committed monarchist, valuing institutional continuity and the accumulated wisdom of past generations. Yet, as Labour leader, he forged a new social contract between the citizen and state, seeking to give “security to the common man”. The intention was simultaneously to transform but conserve what he valued most about Britain. His politics were paradoxical, and today you might call him a Burkean socialist; he was never a Marxist or what Orwell dismissively called a “book-trained” socialist.

His socialism was rooted in practical experience of poverty – he “matured into socialism”, it was said - when he became a social worker in London’s East End. After Oxford he had qualified as a barrister but a private allowance from his father enabled him to pursue philanthropic work at his old school’s Haileybury House mission and at Toynbee Hall, a Christian mission which encouraged future leaders to work as volunteers. He was sceptical of the earnest intellectualism of the Fabians – Beatrice Webb dismissed him in 1940, the year he joined Churchill’s wartime coalition, as a ”little nonentity”. He had earlier joined the Independent Labour Party and was elected mayor of Stepney in 1919 and as an MP in 1922.

In Citizen Clem, John Bew praises Attlee’s “unobtrusive progressive patriotism”: he believed “love of country could be a noble and unifying theme”. In A Century of Labour, Jon Cruddas calls him an “Edwardian idealist”. It’s a good description: Attlee was born into the age of empire and the horse-drawn carriage, and yet as prime minister commissioned Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, his Labour government played a leading role in the foundation of Nato and granted independence to India. He still found time to play golf with his wife during the working week.

Attlee rejected revolutionary socialism, seeking not to overthrow the existing social order but to reform it from within. After the Second World War, he aspired to build the ‘New Jerusalem’ - a reimagined state that empowered working-class citizens to lead more secure and dignified lives. As he once put it, the goal was to pour “new wine into old bottles without bursting them”.

After Labour lost the 1955 general election under his leadership, Attlee, aged 72, was elevated to the peerage as Earl Atlee and Viscount Prestwood. The election was called just three weeks after Anthony Eden had become Conservative leader.

The so-called natural party of government, renowned for its majestic pragmatism, was adapting to the new world of cradle-to-grave welfare, free education, unemployment and pension protection, universal healthcare and nationalised industries and public utilities. By 1955, Attlee was not exactly a man out of time, but he was tired and associated with wartime austerity, John said. He’d led Labour for 20 years, having succeeded George Lansbury, the Christian pacifist who opposed rearmament and was accused at the 1935 party conference by Ernest Bevin, the working-class trade union titan who became foreign secretary under Attlee, of “hawking his conscience around”. He resigned after the conference and Attlee defeated Arthur Greenwood and Herbert Morrison to become leader.

John was 11 when his grandfather died in 1967, aged 84. “Towards the end of his life I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I was a little boy and no one explained to me that he’d had a stroke. He was a very old man by then, and I wasn’t able to get much out of him. I’d give my right arm to have a couple of hours with him now.”

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Attlee and Margaret Thatcher are considered the two greatest post-war prime ministers because they govern from beyond the grave, exerting a powerful influence even in death over their respective parties. Can Labour escape the long shadow of Attlee, I asked John.

He replied by posing two questions of his own. “Why was that government so successful? And why was he so successful? The two standout things about Clem – and I’ve tried to adhere to the first, especially – is that he never made an enemy unnecessarily. When they needed a new leader, he was the one they could all sign up to. They might have thought he had weaknesses, such as his extraordinary shyness, but they didn’t hate him. Second, he was brilliant at getting disparate people to work together. And people liked working for him. He also had good political judgement.”

As Attlee himself once said, “A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement.”

There were several attempted coups against him. On one occasion – not mentioned in his autobiography - Morrison told Attlee it was time for Bevin to become prime minister. “Clem just picked up the phone in front of Morrison and rang Ernie and said, ‘I hear you want to be prime minister? Is that correct?’ ‘No, prime minister, that is not correct.’ Blam, click. End of coup. He just faced it head on.”

Attlee had what John calls “moral character”, shaped by his experiences in the First World War and as a volunteer in the East End. “The poverty he must have seen in the East End, we just can’t imagine it now. I cannot believe the mortality rate of children. All these children being born and they’d just die unnecessarily…”

Not only could Attlee do politics well, but he had a coherent political philosophy and set a clear direction for his government. Contrast his government’s purpose with Keir Starmer’s floundering operation. Clement’s close friend Jack Lawson, a fellow Labour MP, said of him that he had “the kind of solidity and integrity which responsibility turned into massiveness”. Cruddas has perceptively written of how “there remains a sense of something hidden deep within the character of the man”.

What accounted for this hiddenness?

In his autobiography, Attlee repeatedly refers to his “painful shyness”, something John shares and believes explains his grandfather’s reserved and undemonstrative style. “I can understand Clem’s shyness because I’m actually a very shy person as well. You see me confident here but the reason why I am confident is because of my position. I have to push myself – you know, to make a speech in public. It’s not what I want to do but it’s my duty to do it.”

Duty is perhaps the most important word in the family lexicon.

One popular joke about Attlee was: “An empty taxi drove up to No 10 and Mr Attlee got out.” It characterised how he was perceived by many of his contemporaries: condescended to, underestimated, misunderstood. Orwell called him a “dead fish”. David Lloyd George said he was a “pygmy”. For Aneurin Bevan, who in 1951 resigned from the Labour cabinet over the imposition of charges for dentistry and spectacles, Attlee’s radicalism was compromised by his “bourgeois values”. A coruscating unsigned New Statesman profile of 1955 denounced his lack of imagination and asked why such a “conventional, conservative-minded man” would wish to lead Labour. Even when he was praising Attlee, Ramsay Macdonald, who betrayed the party in 1931 when he formed the national government, slighted him by saying he was “the most uninteresting, unimaginative but most reliable among his backbenchers”. Churchill said he was “a modest man with much to be modest about”.

“It’s a very good line,” John says of the Churchill quip, and points out that Churchill and Attlee had great mutual respect and remained close to the end of their lives. “And what Winston said is true. But it’s very ambiguous, isn’t it? You can read it one way: we are modest people with much to be modest about. But read it another way. In other words, you’re aware of certain successes, but you’re still modest about them.”

It’s a form of praise, then, not mockery?

“Yes, I think so.”

There is much to praise. With every thin-spun, here-today-gone-tomorrow administration, the achievements of 1945-51 seem even more significant. “There’s been no successful attempt at revisionism,” he said. “Even Winston has experienced some difficulties but not Clem.”

As we parted, John Attlee turned to me and said: “The title, if I did something wrong, got into trouble – don’t even think about it. Oh, God. If it happened to me, I’d go to Latin America instantly. But rest assured, I’d never do anything that would get me into trouble, because it would be dreadful to let the side down. You’ve inherited the title. You’re the grandson of the prime minister. You know one of the two greatest post-war prime ministers, and possibly the greatest one. It’s a hell of a lot to live up to.”