Fifty years ago today, I broke the light in the loft of our Cardiff home. I only know the date this happened because a far more historic event happened the same day. Britain held a second general election in eight months – only the second time two general elections had taken place in a calendar year. (The other time was 1910, when the Liberal government was locked in a titanic battle with the unelected House of Lords to pass the People’s Budget, which introduced Britain’s first state pension.)

Harold Wilson had very narrowly won the first 1974 election in February, picking up fewer votes but a handful more seats than the Conservative government, led by Ted Heath. The Tory PM had gone to the country in the midst of a bitter battle with the striking coal miners. He framed the vote as ‘Who governs Britain?’ The electorate (at least by the rules of the UK’s first past the post voting system) answered: ‘Not you!’

It was clear that, hampered by the first hung parliament since the war, Wilson would soon call another election to try to win a working majority. In the event, he gained a margin of a pitifully thin three seats. There followed a chaotic, exhausting yet enthralling period in British politics. Wilson himself surprised almost everyone by stepping down aged 60 in 1976, leaving Jim Callaghan to cope with the loss of that wafer-thin majority in 1977. He negotiated the Lib-Lab pact with the Liberal party and the government survived until losing a confidence vote in March 1979. The election that followed brought Margaret Thatcher to power as Britain’s first woman prime minister.

I met Callaghan six years later, when Dad and I visited him in his House of Commons office on a mission to secure a work permit for a musician from Hong Kong who was appearing in a concert in Cardiff. I’d just graduated from university, and Sunny Jim asked me what I wanted to do for a living. When I replied that I’d like to work in PR or journalism, Callaghan turned to my father and commented, ‘They all want to do that know, don’t they!” I tell the story of that meeting in more detail here.