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“Arthur Tovey,” Rob says, in a calm voice typical of someone from his part of South Wales. “He’s the person who convinced me I could do this. I used to go to my local church as a teenager, and one day he invited me to a discussion group he and his wife were having. They didn’t have much, but when you went into their house you felt like a king. He told me he thought I had a gift for storytelling, and I guess it struck a chord.”

Even so, for a teenager dreaming of the stages of Las Vegas, being told he might have the gift of the gab didn’t resonate immediately. But a few years later, a local solicitor approached Rob and said he wanted to train someone up to become part of the practice. No one from his family had done anything similar – as Rob says, there were only three books in his house, and a teacher had once written in a school report that he was “making no use of the little ability he has”.

John Loosemore, however, was insistent. Passing all his law exams, less than a decade later Rob was a joint senior partner in a ten-office legal practice. He and John were travelling the world, helping others to run businesses. He had met wife Dianne, bought a house and started a family. But when the first public-speaking invitation landed on his desk, it still struck fear into him.

Every week for 30 years – first on an ad hoc basis and then through Care for the Family, the charity he and Dianne established – he has spoken to more than a million people in live events.

He uses his experiences to help people from all walks of life work through challenges. But there are some elements of his life that, no matter how gifted a storyteller he may be, still sound like pure fiction.

The story of Ronnie Lockwood – as told in A Knock at the Door, the latest of his 30 or so books – is the ultimate case in point.

It’s just before Christmas 1975 and a homeless man knocks on the door of a family home in South Wales. He is carrying a bag of clothes and a frozen chicken. The door is opened, and he is invited in. He ends up staying with the family for Christmas. He lives there right up to his death 45 years later.

Rob says he had never thought of it as anything special. But in beginning research for his PhD, he found the story was almost without match.

Published in November 2024, his book has received rave reviews and even reduced one interviewer to tears on air. It is a deeply personal story now told to the whole world.

“If we ever wanted to talk to him about something, he used to look at me and say ‘Have I done a bad thing?’. Being able to reassure him that nothing could have been further from the truth was a blessing.”