Parliamentary Private Secretary

Let me drop in this.

This is Alec Douglas Hume, then Lord Hume, who obviously former Prime Minister later, but before that was PPS, so Parliamentary Private Secretary, to Neville Chamberlain, so a very close aide.

Here he is talking about how Chamberlain felt ahead of the debate.

Yes.

Yeah, Freeman has a pretty meteoric rise, not quite as meteoric as Harold Wilson, who was one year Freeman's junior, but was a minister more quickly, and of course, a cabinet minister, where Freeman never was.

But almost as soon as he becomes an MP, he's made a PPS, a Parliamentary Private Secretary, to the Secretary of State for War at the time, Jack Lawson.

And then the following year in 1946, about 15 months after he has entered Parliament, he's a minister in his own right.

He is now Under-Secretary of State in the War Office.

out of the podcast.

David Cameron had Gavin Williamson as his PPS, and he was a brilliant purveyor of parliamentary gossip to David Cameron.

Who's your Gavin Williamson?

So I don't need a Gavin Williamson because I've got WhatsApp.

And the great ones do it very sparingly.

Others send me every single thing that they're thinking, but eventually I get through the messages.

No one's really abused the privilege, but it does mean that I'm more in touch with what's going on, certainly for what people want me to know, and that's That's great, but I do have a brilliant PPS.

His name is John Glenn.