In the car he listened to Radio 1, where Hugh Ames was talking about his, Jeremy’s, story. For once he didn’t feel the least bit tired. Yesterday he’d worked right at the newspaper’s molten core and some of its heat and power had transferred themselves to him. He felt again something that in his slow disappointment he’d begun to believe he never had: the excitement of the news, the hectic barging speed of catching a story and the belief that journalism, no matter how threadbare and put upon, was the finest profession known to men. He himself could not say how he’d managed to spot the bombers for what they were. It must have been some kind of exquisitely honed sensitivity, the hunch of all hunches. The years of drudging had paid their dividend.

Ames interrupted himself for an update just in: the Met was drafting thousands of extra officers from Kent, Surrey, Essex and East Anglia, hugely expanding the scope of the operation. At this very moment, uniformed police were going door-to-door looking for clues and raids were taking place on the homes of those linked to the terror gang.

But Ames wasn’t talking about the brave determination of the police and the Beast to root out terror. Instead he counted up the incidents of Islamophobic violence that had been reported just this morning. Three young Muslim men in Luton had been badly beaten up by what was rumoured to be a group of ex-servicemen, someone had smeared excrement on the door of a mosque in Cardiff, Twitter was seething with stories of intimidation and hate speech, and a whole row of halal butchers in London’s East End had had bricks thrown through their windows, one wrapped in the front page of the Daily Beast.

Ames addressed his studio guests: ‘So, I think we have to ask, don’t we, aside from the very real danger of terrorism, what role is played in all this by provocation? The Daily Beast’s headline this morning, “Muslims declare war on Britain”, has already attracted dozens of complaints to IPSO, the Press-standards authority, one of them from Julian Winfield, the editor of the Impartial, who has also reported it to the Met as incitement to religious hatred. Now, we all know there’s little love lost between the Impartial and the Beast at the best of times, but since that headline hit the newsstands this morning there’s been this spate of shocking anti-Muslim violence. So I think we have to ask the question, who is doing more to incite terror in this country, Islamic extremists or the Daily Beast?’