I push the old-fashioned white enamelled doorbell. In five weeks, if all goes according to Labour’s plan, the owner of this house will pack up and move across town to Number 10. He will be the leader of the world’s fourth largest economy, with a military capacity to match, including a sizeable arsenal of nuclear warheads. The journey from the bay-windowed family home to the wind tunnel of Downing Street will squeeze his private space and private life to almost nothing. He’ll become our property – and by us I don’t mean ‘you the people,’ I mean ‘we the media’.

A blonde woman in an office suit and stockinged feet opens the door. She has her hair in a bun speared with a pencil, and a two-year-old girl on her hip. Superwoman, or rather Super PR Woman.

‘Oh sugar, I thought you were the nanny,’ she says. She looks back through the doorway – ‘Johnny! Your guest is here’ – and then back at me. ‘You are here for Johnny, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right. I –’

‘Everybody is, these days. You’d think his job was more important than mine.’ She gives a mannish snort. ‘It’ll only get worse when he wins. Shit.’ She has stepped backwards on to a Lego brick.

From inside, I hear Todd’s honeyed voice. ‘Is that Gil?’

I nod.

‘Then you’d better come in.’

I follow, picking my way through the Lego, Duplo and remote-controlled cars that have turned the parquet floor into a neo-expressionist canvas. ‘Excuse the mess,’ she says.

Johnny Todd is sitting at a large white oak table in the kitchen extension at the back. Sunshine floods in through the skylights above and the glass doors to a small garden. In his crisp white shirt and sage knitted silk tie, he looks like a management consultant. A Boss jacket hangs on the back of his straight-backed chair.

He rises and clasps my hand, the over-familiar two-handed squeeze of American politicians. He clamps his eyes on mine. Their green is startling.

‘Gil, great to see you. Sit down, sit down. Coffee?’ There’s a large cafetière on the table. ‘How do you take it? Black? Super.’ His eyes drift over my shoulder, as if he’s expecting someone else. ‘When’s your snapper arriving?’

‘I asked him to come a bit later.’ I take the chair he offers me opposite him. ‘I prefer to talk for a bit without distractions, if that’s OK?’

‘If it’s OK with him. I’m a bit tight for time.’

‘I am sure it won’t be a problem,’ I say, disingenuously. The photographer will be furious I’ve shunted him to the last fifteen minutes, and the picture desk will be too. But I hate witnesses to my technique when I’m trying to persuade an interviewee to say something they’ll live to regret.