I’ve always wondered if Breitner was aware of the proximity when he moved his tabloid from Fleet Street to its new home five years ago. The stock in trade of both Globes was – and is – sex, scandal, and the foibles of our rulers. Both play to a baying mob. As Shakespeare wrote, ‘I have seen corruption boil and bubble till it o’er run the stew; laws for all faults, but faults so countenanced, that the strong statutes stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop, so much in mock as mark.’ It might have been a Globe editorial.

Thatch and wattle have given way to steel and glass, but in other respects not much has changed. Sanctimonious politicians lecture us on how to behave, and then follow another code or none themselves: witness the Tory ministers and MPs in the last few years exposed for pimping themselves out to the highest bidder. In Breitner’s Globe, no less than in Shakespeare’s, anyone and everyone is a legitimate target for public humiliation.

When it comes to our rulers, no one kowtows before skewering quite like Kevin Wilkinson. The Globe’s political editor can match wits with the Prime Minister’s spokesman in the Lobby briefing, but he also has a bloodhound’s nose for scandal. At the Palace of Westminster, he is feared, loathed and reluctantly admired, by prey and colleagues. His preferred route to a scoop is to play a round of golf with the government’s deputy chief whip, who has a black book on the peccadilloes of every Tory MP (I say a black book, but I assume it runs to volumes). When the chief whip needs to bring a troublesome backbencher into line, or make an example pour encourager les autres, the deputy feeds Wilkinson a titbit: an MP’s regular excursions to a pub favoured by rent boys in Clapham; another’s secret third home, a flat in Kensal Rise, where he’s installed a young Commons secretary and where he has a habit of ‘working’ into the small hours. All that Wilkinson has to do is put a snapper outside said pub or maisonette and Bob’s your uncle: a salacious Globe page 2 scoop, divorce papers to follow. If Kendall is hiding something, the bloke most likely to have an inkling – apart from the whips themselves – will be Kevin Wilkinson.