It wasn’t just the journalists who thought Douglas Yeodall was a lousy choice; so did Douglas Yeodall. He stared out across the sea of seven hundred faces, at one thousand, four hundred eyeballs, across the battery of cameras and microphones and shorthand note pads, and a silence as thick as a mushroom cloud of fall-out dust, and soldiered on.

‘I’m sure there are many of you who understand the principles of nuclear physics,’ he paused for a murmur of assent, but none was forthcoming, ‘I’m sure there are many of you here today who know a great deal more about this subject than I do – I just work here!’ He paused for a titter of laughter; there was none. His audience ate ordinary statesmen and prime ministers for lunch, and presidents and kings for dinner; they weren’t going to start laughing at the wisecracks of a two-bit lecturer from the backwoods of Somerset. Any more gags and Douglas Yeodall wasn’t even going to make the peanut bowl at cocktail hour. He appeared to realize this, and straightened up his body, and aimed the tip of his nose at the back of the hall. His eyes were now staring straight into the floodlights. They dazzled him, but he didn’t mind. At least he wasn’t staring into the eyeballs of those stony-faced bastards any more.

‘If I bang my two fists together …’ He did so, close up to the microphones, and winced; he’d done it too hard and it hurt. He shook his hands, and the audience burst into a roar of laughter. Yeodall looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled to himself; he had a feeling he’d scored a point.

‘If I bang my fists together – it hurts!’ He continued. ‘It also makes them warmer, because the friction of the two hands banging together has made heat. If my hands were to disintegrate on collision, even more heat would be generated. It is the way in which heat is generated that makes nuclear power stations different from all other types of power station. I’m going to put this as much into layman terms as I can, but if I lose you – or you lose me – it is explained in the booklet you have been given.

‘Everything in life is made up of atoms – that, I think, everybody now knows – but atoms also are made up of something. They are made up of particles called protons and neutrons; to give you an idea of the size of these particles, one thousand billion neutrons placed side by side in a single line would just about stretch the width of a pin-head.’ He waited for a gasp of amazement. There wasn’t one.