Will he help? Our relationship is a wary one. Like me, he is a story-scenting predator. He’s right at the top of the journalistic food chain. It’s not his natural instinct to share red meat. But we have an accommodation of sorts. I’ve laid off salacious stories with him that weren’t right for the FC, and when the deputy chief whip has told him some arcane detail of a change to rules for company boards – so vital to our readers, so irrelevant to his – he has pushed that intelligence in my direction. The Globe doesn’t care all that much about the Cadbury Code on Corporate Governance, and the FC takes the patrician view that if an MP smears Cadbury’s Dairy Milk over his toy boy lover that is his business and not ours. So in theory I should be able to offer him something to make it worth his while to tell me what I want to know about Kendall – but it will require a bit of improv.

I rang ahead from the cab to make sure Wilkinson would be there. I was pretty sure he’d have gone to the morning editorial conference and would not head to the House of Commons until after lunch. Even so, it takes me longer than anticipated to negotiate my way inside. A makeshift desk has been set up at the entrance, where plain-clothed security men are questioning everyone. Breitner’s notoriety, and the Globe’s no-holds-barred British flag-waving, make it a target for terrorists and cranks. It’s only last year that the IRA set off a three-thousand pound bomb in Canary Wharf, not so far from here.

‘Kevin Wilkinson’s expecting me,’ I say, which gets me into the lobby, but it takes my FC photo pass to reassure the lady at the reception desk.

‘One of us,’ she says.

Wilkinson comes down in the lift and swipes me through the glass security gates. ‘What brings you to the underworld? Shouldn’t you be spinning for Todd and your Labour mates?’

I ignore the provocation as we step into the lift. Wilkinson worshipped Thatcher, regards Ramsey as a traitor, and sees Labour – even a Labour Party reupholstered by Todd – as agents of the devil. He is presumably going through a crisis of confidence and conscience, because if Todd wins as big as seems likely, a remade Downing Street will cast Wilkinson into the desert. He won’t like going from oracle to the man who knows nothing. Can he bring himself to crawl to Todd and – hardest of all – to his old subordinate, Fisher? I choose not to touch this nerve. Instead I say, ‘I’ve got a proposal for you.’

‘Oh, darling, have you really?’ he replies, laying on the Kenneth Williams innuendo. ‘Come into my boudoir.’