Before him, hundreds of people typed or talked on the phone or asked each other questions in a low maze of desks spreading out under a pressboard ceiling. It was broken up by square pillars festooned with rotas, complaints and marked-up pages, and at the distant edge was a glowing strip of frosted windows on to Kensington High Street, whose natural light hardly encroached on the room’s artificial brightness. Everywhere were loose sheaves of printed paper, empty cups and sandwich wrappers, and all of it and everyone was slightly scruffy, slightly neglected; the computers old, the bins full, the desks not decorated with anything personal.

Demarcating the territories within the newsroom were flimsy partitions on which the departments pinned A3 prints of their best work. Features had a picture of an apparently decapitated Princess Beatrice pulling her own head out of a top hat. Health had one that looked like a malevolent crab. In front of this the Health editor, a carelessly dressed woman in her fifties, was saying into a phone, ‘Then find out what kind of fucking growth it fucking well is. And if you can’t find out, get one yourself and ask a fucking doctor.’

To Jeremy’s left, on the wall towards which the newsroom pointed, was a grid of bright, fuzzy squares. These were the English and American news channels, projected there soundlessly alongside an unending scroll of BeastOnline. In one square, a serious blonde in a trouser suit was belabouring a group of surly proletarians. In another, a reporter was talking earnestly into a microphone while behind him dense black smoke chugged from a burnt-out petrol station. The slug at the top left of the screen read ‘TERROR’, and Jeremy’s mind jumped to the two people in burqas he’d seen outside; he wondered whether they were still there. In the next square, someone in Parliament was shaking a roll of paper at the indifferent opposition, the green benches almost empty. Beside that was the spool of BeastOnline: ‘How romcoms can turn you LIBERAL’ – ‘Shhh! 60% of women can’t keep secrets’ – ‘Rejected migrants given luxury mosque, and YOU’RE paying for it.’