Pimlott joined the Department of Politics and Sociology in 1981 and, during his two decades at Birkbeck, published distinguished biographies on Hugh Dalton, Harold Wilson, and the Queen. Pimlott’s aim was to communicate the importance of politics beyond the academy.

For Pimlott, writing was a “mechanism for revolution”. His sensitivities towards the political sensibilities of the wider British public were revealed in the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. When Number Ten telephoned him in panic, asking “what can we do? what is the mood?”, Pimlott is reported to have responded “’we could call her the People’s Princess’, which was … what he had called Princess Elizabeth in The Queen”.

When Tony Blair used those words in his address to the nation, they became the touchstone for a nation in mourning.