The Pizzeria Elefantessa is on the north side of the three-lane roundabout at Elephant and Castle, in a 1960s shopping centre redolent of Eastern-bloc brutalism. All the money and power of the City of London is just a fifteen-minute walk north over London Bridge: it’s as though the Thames is a barrier between unfettered capitalism and remorseless state planning. The Berlin Wall has been dismantled but as Todd implied to me, there might just as well be our very own Berlin Wall right here, separating the wealth and ambition of the capital’s financial centre from the dilapidation, failing schools and poverty of hope in estates that sprawl around the Elephant and the Old Kent Road.

Not that the ebullient owners and waiters of the noisy, bustling pizzeria give a stuff about any of that. They’ve rented a vast warehouse of a space for next to nothing, to serve cheap but delicious pizza and pasta to locals and tourists from across the river like me. It’s packed to the rafters every night, which is wholly unsurprising given that it’s hard to spend more than twenty quid for two or three robust courses and a carafe of vino.

There are posters and corny pictures of elephants on every wall, pirouetting in tutus, bespectacled and reading The Times, singing at the opera. The noise of the massive, exposed air-conditioning system is drowned out by the almost deafening chatter of lubricated punters. I’m already sitting down, nursing a glass of basic Chianti from one of those bulbous bottles encased in straw, when Jeremy arrives. He puts his black North Face anorak on the back of his chair, revealing a navy-blue jumper in fine wool with a collar and zipper at the neck. I assume it’s John Smedley, and approve.

‘Wine?’

Jeremy puts his hand over the glass. ‘I’ll stick to water.’

‘Have a slice of garlic pizza bread. Unbelievably delicious.’

‘My tummy doesn’t do well with garlic.’

Jesus. He is hard work. Even getting him here was an effort. ‘Work is busy,’ he told me when I rang him. Which I did not believe for a moment. During an election campaign, pretty much everything in Whitehall shuts down. It was only when I mentioned the photographs that he agreed to meet.

‘What’ll you have?’

He peers at the menu. ‘I’m not very hungry. Maybe a salad?’

I get the waiter’s attention. ‘One insalata Caprese, an insalata mista, and a quattro stagioni pizza. All to come at the same time.’

My mood lightens as soon as the order is in. I love coming here, even when the conversation with my guest is bound to be gruelling. Poor Jeremy is in purgatory and would rather be anywhere else.