Hannan by 26,342 votes.His long association with India had begun before the Second World War when, as a young councillor in Birmingham, he represented Indian communities in his ward. His deployment of variations on the Caro-Kann Defence were formidable. Botvinnik and Smyslov he counted as friends.Disadvantaged by lack of English at home – being second to Russian and Yiddish – and by the fact that so many of the teachers at the Central High School in Leeds were away being killed with the Green Howards or the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, Silverman left at the age of 16 to become a warehouseman and family provider. Jewish application and night-school study enabled him to enter Gray’s Inn at the age of 23 and to be called to the Bar in 1931.In 1935, he was selected as Labour candidate for Moseley, a huge consistuency of 101,169 electors, and lost to P.J.H. But none of us was in the same league as Julius Silverman, a grandmaster by status.

A fellow-traveller he certainly was not.Parliament has had many a good chess player – Michael Foot, Bob Mitchell, Brian Walden come to mind – sitting of an evening in the chess room, under the pictures of Hampden and Pym, and a chess-playing photograph of Balfour and Bonar Law. Russian was spoken at home, and throughout his life Silverman was active in societies of all kinds promoting friendship with the Russian people. In 1945-51 he was new to Parliament and, I was told (by Crossman and Ian Mikardo), did not make the ministerial rank – much less numerous than today – because “Clem, other things being equal, did not promote members of the `chosen race’ to ministerial position, when there were old Haileybury boys and the like pestering for advancement.”Silverman’s father, Nathan, had come from the Minsk area of Russia, as a result of the Pogrom. Faced with the infinite complexity of the Labour government’s Rent Bills, Crossman often reflected that he would have liked the “clever Julius” as a ministerial colleague in the Ministry of Housing.Alas, the timing was all wrong for Silverman, and timing in politics is everything.

Dame Evelyn Sharpe told Dick Crossman in 1964 that in her opinion, as Permanent Secretary, Silverman knew more about municipal housing problems than any other member of the House of Commons. Many had been on the register for 10 years or more.Along with the Shadow Housing Minister, George Lindgren, Silverman put the case for municipal building in the inner city area, and with a weight of experience was able to torment Duncan Sandys, and his Housing Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Bill Deedes, then an MP but later Editor of the Daily Telegraph. In the autumn of 1955, his own city of Birmingham had 62,000 applicants on its ordinary housing register, and it was estimated that of these at least 44,000 families were in acute housing need. He attacked the Conservatives for using the widow and the orphan who owns stocks and shares, or slum property, as an argument for exacting a higher rate of compensation for all stockholders or property owners. If the Conservatives were to accept the principle of a means test in respect of compensation, they would find a good deal of Labour support.Silverman addressed the problems of the large local authorities.

“It is no use telling the tenant, as the Minister [Bevan] is suggesting, that, if he is turned out, the next tenant will get the benefit of reduced rent.” Bevan was offering his protection, and, unless people were prepared to report exorbitant rents to the authorities, Bevan’s Bill, and one of the Labour government’s flagships, would not go very far.In the mid-1950s, Silverman became arguably the most authoritative of all opposition critics on slum landlords and desperate housing situations He did not overegg a pudding His cases stood on their own merits. Again, the tenant did not want to do anything about it, because there was a family of five, and they had nowhere to go, and no prospects of getting anywhere.Few newcomers would have had Silverman’s courage, five minutes into his maiden speech, to say that he wanted to ask Aneurin Bevan “what comfort, what consolation, and what aid” would his Bill bring to such people in the circumstances he described? Silverman told Bevan bluntly that, without security of tenure, the Bill had no teeth. In May 1945, the landlady decided that she wanted somewhere to live, so she came back to the house, and occupied half of it herself, in consideration of which the rent was reduced to pounds 2 15s per week. The tenant was paying pounds 2 15s for a furnished house under a written agreement in 1943. In 1944 the rent was increased to pounds 3, and in 1945 to pounds 3 5s. The furniture was of moderate value, not too good and not too bad. Unfortunately Silverman’s diffident delivery did not match his well-informed content.There was then little of the sycophantic guff from goverment backbenchers that is all too often the currency these days.