The former culture secretary made it to Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics before he found out about his condition.

“I always knew there was a problem because I found reading difficult. The letters would jumble around, and still do, but I just thought that I wasn’t very good at language,” he said.

Despite his undiagnosed dyslexia, Mr Hancock said: “I had my maths and that got me to Oxford.”

It was at university that a tutor spotted that while he was bright and could speak well his writing wasn’t up to standard. He was then screened by the university and “relearnt how to read” with specialist help.

Just having a diagnosis was a relief both for Mr Hancock and his parents.

They had always known something was not right, he said. He once asked his mother what a sign for “swan wood for sale” meant, in fact, it read “sawn wood”.

Once he’d been assessed, he phoned them up: “And they were like, ‘Well, obviously!’ It was like a crossword puzzle, it’s obvious once somebody has given you the answer.”

‘A couple of total catastrophes’

Still, even as an economist at the Bank of England, an MP and then a junior minister, Mr Hancock kept it secret.

Instead, he sought ways to deal with his dyslexia without revealing it to anyone other than a select few colleagues, although it did not save him from “a couple of total catastrophes”.

At the 2001 general election, Mr Hancock was helping the campaign for Nick St Aubyn, the MP for Guildford at the time. Putting together a leaflet which would be sent to every home in Guildford, he picked out Mr St Aubyn’s phrase “I want to unite the community” and put it in big letters.

“It was only after it had been posted that somebody spotted that I had in fact written ‘I want to untie the community’. It was a disaster. He lost his seat by 400 votes.”

Mostly, though, he found ways to cope. As a minister, for example, he would ask for a one-page brief on each stack of documents in his red box so that he could prioritise issues without his slow reading bogging him down.

It was while asking for such help that Mr Hancock said he finally realised he should be open about his dyslexia.

As culture secretary, his new private secretary told him that he too was dyslexic and that Mr Hancock had a duty to “get out there” and show dyslexic children and adults that they could still “make it to the top”.

The response, he said, was overwhelming and incredibly positive. It even led Brandon Lewis, the current Northern Ireland Secretary, to come out about his own dyslexia: