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And he said nothing of it. His eyes had lost the blinking tic, and gazed steadily back at me.

‘Another little interruption in the smooth course of British history?’ I asked.

He nodded soberly. ‘Speculative, of course. But we may some day have to consider our position in relation to what the erudite Mr Ascherson delights in calling the Hanoverian regime. Think of it as…’

‘Insurance,’ Reid said gleefully.

I looked from one to the other and lit a cigarette, moving my hands very carefully to keep them steady.

Until that moment I’d thought myself immune to the glamour of power, in exactly the way that a eunuch might be to the glamour of women. I’d never stood up for an anthem or straightened for a flag, never fumblingly inserted anything in a ballot-box. The attitude that made my parents’ sect reclaim the taunting nickname of ‘impossibilists’ had, I fancied, been inherited in my own anti-political stance. Oh, I’d wanted to have influence, to change the way people thought, just as my parents did; but – again like them – I’d never seriously expected the opportunity to actually get my hands on power’s inviting flesh.

In short, I’d been a complete wanker, until that moment when I learned what I’d been missing. And you know, what I felt then was almost sexual; it’s something in the wiring of the male primate brain.

The big thrill wasn’t that they were offering me power – they were offering me a bit more influence, that was all. No, what made the hairs on my neck prickle was that they thought I might – any decade now – have power; that I might represent something that it was a smart move to get on the right side of well in advance; that somewhere down the line might be my Finland Station.

‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of better-known and better-connected people with views similar to mine, so why me?’

Reid looked as if he were about to say something, but Cochrane cut him off.

‘It’s because you don’t have connections with any part of the present establishment, and we wouldn’t wish you to cultivate any. Your views on the land question and the banking system are dismissed as thoroughly unsound by every free-market think-tank I’ve consulted. Your political connections are such that your MI5 and Special Branch files are, I understand, commendably thick. Your Internet articles on the recent Oklahoma outrage, on Chechnya, on Bosnia, have added the FBI and the CIA and FIS to your attentive readership. So, you see –’

‘I see, all right,’ I said. ‘You want to buy someone who looks like he’s not been bought.’

‘Christ, man –!’ Reid began, but again Cochrane interrupted.

‘Excuse me, chaps,’ he said, dusting grains of chilli from his fingers. ‘I’ve never had a radical conscience to wrestle with, and quite frankly I’d be a liability to my own case in the kind of discussion I can foresee developing.’ He smiled wryly, almost regretfully, at us. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it.’

He stood up, held out his hand, and I rose to shake it, mischievously returning his peculiar grip. ‘Good evening, Jon, and I hope I see you again.’

‘Well, likewise, Ian.’

He nodded to Dave, and departed.

Dave remained silent until Cochrane was out of the door. Then he put his elbows on the table and his fingers to his cheeks, the heels of his hands almost meeting in front of his mouth.

‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I meant it. You didn’t expect me to jump at the chance of being the radical front-man for some bunch of suits worried about what happens when their present cosy arrangement goes down the tubes?’

‘What a fucking idiot,’ Dave said, not unkindly. ‘You’re the last person I’d have expected…ah, the hell with it. Let’s hit the pubs.’

In the conveniently close Malt Shovel, he let me get him a pint of Caffrey’s and told me of his plan for the rest of the evening.

‘I want to show you some of my favourite pubs,’ he explained. ‘Only one way to do that – a pub-crawl by