It’s a proper English spring, warm, blossomy. I’m on the upper deck of the number 24 bus, travelling up Camden High Street towards Primrose Hill. I’m acting on an impulse and I’m not sure it’s a good one. I woke up thinking that, on this of all days, I wanted to hang out with my nephews, Clare’s children. Perhaps as unexpected is that when I rang Charles, he was pleased.

‘You can meet them at the school gates and walk them home if you like,’ he said. ‘It would be nice if the au pair could have the afternoon off.’

‘Sure. But do you think they’ll recognise me?’

‘You’d be surprised. Since the funeral they’ve been asking when Uncle Gil would come over. Kids are smart.’

‘Yours seem to be.’ Clare’s.

The bus’s engine rumbles as it sits at idle. There are roadworks ahead and we’re having to wait while an apparently endless queue of traffic comes through the other way. I pick up the paper in my lap and gaze again at the front page.

It’s the Globe, from my daily delivered pile. I brought it with me as a cherished prize, the spoils of war. It shows that I’ve won. That Clare won. In some ways, it’s a Globe classic. There’s a huge picture of the PM’s head peeping out of the top of a dustbin, under the massive headline TIME TO BIN RAMSEY. And in only marginally smaller letters underneath, it says TODD WILL CLEAN UP BRITAIN. The accompanying editorial is, if anything, less subtle. Its conversion to Todd’s Labour is breathlessly excitable. And, if I am frank, a bit embarrassing. Breitner knows that the world in which he is all powerful is being swept away, partly because of his own arrogant excesses, partly because the British people have had enough of his political patsies. This is his last throw of the dice, a humiliating attempt to ingratiate himself with tomorrow’s Prime Minister. It won’t save him.

There have been a number of counter-intuitive headlines on the front pages of Her Majesty’s press over the last few days. First a market-shaking scoop in the Sentinel published last Saturday. MEDIA CORP IS ‘INSOLVENT’, said the headline, while the strap added ‘MPs say Breitner must answer questions about pension fund’. On page five there is a linked column that carries the photo byline of a pasty-faced man in steel-rimmed rectangular spectacles. Alan Scott, the wanker Clare seemingly trusted. There’s not a lot of conspicuous humility in his account of why his revelations are so important to the future of British democracy and the media. It’s a bit of a contrast to his look of sheer disbelief after Jess handed him our story on a garlanded plate.

‘This is painful, boss,’ she said, when I told her we had to give pretty much the whole thing to him.