We need to talk. This is what she wanted me to write. Maybe. She definitely wanted it out there – why else send it to Scott? – and presumably she wanted people to know the Tories had dumped it. Even so, the idea of my sister as a whistleblower is extraordinary, shocking. Something made her desperate.

‘Could you ring the Treasury for a statement of some sort? You’ll probably get a “we never comment on leaks”, but we have to go through the motions. And perhaps start writing it up.’

A sharp look. ‘Whose byline?’

‘Yours.’

‘You sure?’ She’s surprised.

‘You were on to this first. I’ll just sprinkle my magic dust on it when you’ve done the initial draft.’

She gathers up the papers and stuffs them back in the envelope. She has the energised eyes of a hack on the hunt. When we leave the café, I swing left.

‘Where are you going?’ she asks, then realises the answer. ‘Oh, yes. It’s afternoon Lobby.’

I glance at my watch. Quarter to four, bang on time. ‘I’ll call Mary to tell her we’ve got a decent tale for her.’ Mary Nichols is the news editor, who has a mystical understanding of what the FC’s crusty male readers want to see on the paper’s front page. She’d be the next editor, except that she went to the wrong college – well, no college at all – and is the wrong sex.

‘Don’t forget to ring the Treasury’.

*

I head to the Lobby briefing feeling almost buoyant. The news editor loved the story – ‘It sounds like a splash. Can you do me 650 words?’ – and I am back in the saddle. With this I can belatedly make it up to Clare, in my own way.

I speed-walk along the corridor parallel to the river, up broad majestic stairs, down a capacious corridor whose dark wooden doors are all firmly closed and guarded by attendants. This is the committee room corridor. I swing a left, and then a right, to another richly carpeted staircase; and then up three floors to a narrow corridor of glass-fronted offices that are always empty. I follow the green carpet to a stone staircase wide enough for just a single person, at the top of which is a closed and unlabelled dark door.

I push through it into a cavernous bare-raftered room at the top of one of Parliament’s neo-Gothic towers – a place where absurd rituals are enacted and secrets are shared. It is satirically appropriate that this hidden chamber is shared with a masonic lodge. As usual, my Lobby colleagues are turning chairs to face the front, because they were the other way round for the just-finished meeting of the Press Gallery’s freemasons. No one has ever invited me to join the chapter, probably because I am conspicuously an Oxbridge-educated, know-it-all Jew. Fuck ’em.