J is a dangerous man. He can charm people into thinking that he alone is the answer to our prayers, but all he wants is control and power. He does not really care about making lives better. He is seducing the country and he will become PM.

Socialism was forged for another age. It has to be rethought for an age of information, an age of services, an age where the forge, the mill, the mine and the lathe are no longer the foundations of our way of life. But this is not J’s mission. He has neither the intellect nor the ambition. What he wants is adoration, little else.

He will win because people believe in him. They believe he can restore faith in politics and public service. When he doesn’t – because he doesn’t have the imagination and because he is too selfish – there will be a heavy toll. All he will leave is cynicism, disenchantment and chaos. And after he has taken what he wants, he will walk away, protesting his innocence, blameless in his own mind, and leave the country holding the baby.

Just like me.

I blink. ‘J’ is clearly not ‘Jeremy’ here. ‘He will become PM’ – it can only be Johnny Todd. But why such bitterness? As if he’s a sociopath, who Clare alone can see.

She took a huge risk and met him in secret. He was her hope. He promised to enact the policy that Kendall had dropped and he has kept his promise. The abolition of the dividend tax credit is in his manifesto. From tomorrow, assuming Labour win, it will be officially part of the government’s programme. Did she assume he would renege on this pledge to her? Or was there something else?

I return to the diary section. It starts on the first of January. I’d scanned it before, but now I read each day’s entries meticulously. Meetings, phone calls, parents’ evenings, dinners with Mum and Dad, a doctor’s appointment. But interrupting all of them, a single letter, attached to varying times of the day or night: ‘J’.

Johnny Todd, chatting with me in his kitchen, in shirtsleeves: I met her in a few transition meetings. He is a lying bastard. Clare was meeting him every week, sometimes several times a week. At lunchtimes, early afternoons, a couple of Thursday nights when she was supposed to be at a book group, and once on a Saturday morning when (according to the journal) Charles had taken the boys to football practice.

The shadow of a conversation I had in my parents’ house comes back to me, the first time Jeremy voiced his concerns about Clare. She’d been a bit different lately. She kept popping out of the office, nothing in the diary. She even missed scheduled meetings. I had to cover up for her. It was out of character.