For Jess and I, seeing our story under a rival’s byline is as galling as it gets. ‘It’s shit. But what choice do we have? We can’t write it, can we?’

‘He’ll win Journalist of the Year for this.’

I grind my teeth and say nothing. It fucking hurts.

When Jess went to see him, on my instructions, he kept asking, ‘Why aren’t you running this?’

I’d given Jess the line. ‘Just tell him it’s because Breitner owns the FC, and there is an obvious conflict of interest. And also that Clare would have wanted him to have the scoop.’ I had to ask Jess to deliver the gift though. I couldn’t face doing it myself. Pathetic, I know.

To be fair, Scott did a proper job on Breitner with how he wrote it up. Almost everything was there: the Albion Super Highway losses, the black hole in the pension fund, Breitner’s desperate attempt to get his hands on Capital TV’s cash. Clare’s tax on pension funds was only mentioned in passing, but that didn’t matter. There was enough in his copy to keep the Serious Fraud Office, the Securities and Investment Board, and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigating for months.

Gratifyingly, Media Corp’s share price tanked on the morning the story dropped. The shares were down more than 30 per cent by 10 a.m. But in the hours and days afterwards it crept gradually up again. As yet no bank has called in its loans and the statements from the authorities – the SFO, the SIB, the MMC – are all of the stalling variety: versions of ‘we don’t comment on possible or pending investigations’.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Jess, after the share price had regained two-thirds of its losses, and there had still been no police raid on Media Corp’s offices.

‘Everyone’s waiting for the election. They want confirmation the Tories are out and that Breitner no longer has powerful allies in high office.’

She is probably right. And I don’t have a scintilla of doubt Todd will not only win, but win huge. I am so confident that on Sunday I bet two hundred pounds at fifty to one that the Tories won’t win a single seat in Scotland or Wales. Bye bye, Breitner.

*

On Monday night I was kicking myself for not wagering more. Because that’s when the Globe ran another story I know something about. At 10 p.m., while in The Groucho having a quiet drink with Jess, the FC night news editor rang me. I moved to the foyer. ‘Gilbert, sorry to trouble you, but I wanted to make you aware of the splash in the Globe.’

He read me the screaming headline: MY GAY DAYS WITH CHEATING CHANCELLOR. Fucking hell. Jeremy has coughed. And to Kevin Wilkinson. For which he too will win a fucking press award. I hope he chokes on it.