Denis Healey’s was supposed to be massive, a thing of wonder. Ted Heath had a big one too, by all accounts. But Harold Wilson didn’t seem to have much to boast about. And Margaret Thatcher’s was considered too narrow really to count.

But that’s the problem with hinterlands. Everyone’s definition of what’s required is entirely personal.

Your hinterland, the range of accumulated knowledge and cultural reference you carry around with you, is inevitably, like a garden, a product of personal taste and prevailing environment. The Healey hinterland was overflowing with the hardy perennials of Whig history and English poetry you’d expect of a scholarship boy to Thirties Balliol. As was Ted Heath’s, with the added colour that comes from a musical training.

Hinterlands inevitably change over time. A child of the Forties would never forget Mona Lott, a character from the radio series It's That Man Again, which was as ubiquitous during the war as Woolton pie and Spam fritters. During the Eighties, when one of Thatcher’s officials made reference to Ms Lott in one briefing, it dated him as instantly, and precisely, as if he’d taken out a ukelele before an EU summit and started singing about how we would hang out our washing on the Siegfried line. In the same way, a child of the Nineties would know instantly what it meant to accuse an individual of Victor Meldrewism, but in decades to come the reference may be as obscure as . . .

Well, perhaps as obscure as calling someone the Hans Sachs of Llanystumdwy. The who, you may well ask. Well, indeed. In John Grigg’s biography The Young Lloyd George, published in the Seventies and never out of print since, Grigg explores the influence on LG’s boyhood of the uncle who brought him up. Uncle Lloyd was a shoemaker in the village of Llanystumdwy. But he was much more — a scholar, preacher, master craftsman, employer and community leader. Searching for an analogy that would convey how respected a figure he was, Grigg opts for a reference to Wagner. Hans Sachs is the cobbler in Die Meistersinger, a respected craftsman and mentor to apprentices. The Alan Sugar of Nuremberg.

When Grigg was writing he assumed that a general reader would be as familiar with the character of Hans Sachs as he would be with the name of the Prime Minister of the day — every decent hinterland would have its Wagner corner. The stock of references that contemporary readers carry with them will be as wide as any, but they will be drawn from very different sources. The story of Katie and Peter may be more in our minds than the tragedy of Tristan and Isolde, the dilemmas of stem-cell technologists more alive to us than the quandaries of Welsh Disestablishment.

But while our hinterlands are as wide, that certain areas of knowledge have become neglected, overgrown or obscurely thicketed still leaves us at a disadvantage. So much of literature and history depends on a knowledge of classical myth, Scripture and past cultural glories to illuminate every meaning that reading these texts without that knowledge is like walking around the Louvre at midnight — we know we’re in the presence of greatness but there is so much wonderful that is obscured. We are looking through a glass darkly, as it were. Perhaps we should have a campaign to restore the neglected parts of our hinterland, like other glories of our heritage and environment, to the state we used to enjoy. Who should we get to start digging?

Museums for PMs . . .

On the subject of heritage glories, can I recommend a visit to Llanystumdwy? It’s the home of the Lloyd George Museum — the only one in Britain devoted to a past prime minister. The curators are passionate advocates of LG’s cause, the films, and an animatronic LG held even my children rapt, and the story of his life is laid out in gripping detail.

Immediately after a visit, walk the few hundred yards to the Dwyfor Café, by the banks of the river where LG was baptised as a 12-year-old, where you’ll be served good home-made food. Over my gammon, egg and chips I wondered why we don’t have more museums to past PMs, as they have libraries for ex-presidents in the US. Why not an Attlee museum to celebrate the creation of the welfare state in the East End or a special place in the West Midlands to tell the too-long-forgotten story of Stanley Baldwin? Aren’t these corners of our national hinterland worth cultivating?

What a Teese

Finally, on the subject of the Meistersinger, I, like many, sat rapt through the German entry for Eurovision wondering just which bits of Dita von Teese (born Heather Renee Sweet) were Teutonic (or indeed animatronic) as opposed to just pneumatic.

That was until my wife told me that Dita was chosen because her ex-husband, the Goth rock legend Marilyn Manson, is hugely popular in Germany and once exhibited some of his own artwork in a Cologne gallery. I was forced to turn to my wife as Dita danced in front of us, and compliment her on her own, quite wonderful hinterland . . .

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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