Here I am, back on the long march to freedom. Without bothering to consult my editor, I have unilaterally ended my leave; it was not helping. On each side of the Burma Road are rooms filled with reporters, mostly men, whose ostensible role is to be the public’s eyes and ears on those we choose to rule us. The rooms are high-ceilinged and the windows ogival and majestic, with views over slate roofs and courtyards. It smells of dust toasting on radiators, wet outer garments, tea, and the sweet, woody smell of old newspapers. This place is everything that is right and wrong with Britain’s great institutions. The neo-Gothic structure is sturdy and built to last. The fixtures are cheap and decaying: frayed grubby green carpet, walls a grimy shade of cream, large wooden tables covered in papers and battered personal computers, even the odd typewriter and Tippex bottle. Most mornings we’re greeted by dead mice in the traps. In the afternoons, their cousins scuttle past.

We are on the cusp between technological and cultural ages. The older gents are the gallery reporters, a dying breed of deferential journalistic herbivore, who sit in the gods of the Lords and Commons chambers, chronicling the speeches and interventions and votes. Off duty, they regale anyone who’ll listen with the legends of Churchill and Atlee mesmerising the House, in debates that were a matter of life and death. They witnessed giants, before this age of pygmies.

Soon they will have been pensioned off, or will have drunk and smoked themselves to death, leaving these attic rooms to disrespectful predators like me. My obsession, our obsession, is with the deeds of ministers and MPs – their secret plans and their often grubby extra-curricular activities – rather than their words. We want to find out if the secretary of state for health is selling off the NHS, and whether he is asking his 28-year-old secretary to put on a nurse’s uniform and give him an enema.

Collectively, we are known as the Lobby. We work for rival publications, are ostensibly in competition with each other. But the weight of history in the physical space where we work has turned us into a sort of guild. There is naked collusion between us against the common enemy, the Prime Minister and his Downing Street machine. A few Lobby hacks are agents provocateurs for either Labour or the Tories. Most are anarchists, just trying to cause trouble for anyone with a big job and sense of entitlement.