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I know Alistair Darling had left Loretto School, Musselburgh (for Aberdeen University) shortly before Andrew Marr had arrived (en route to Cambridge), but it was still odd to see the pair of them on my television last Sunday. Odd, I mean, that neither mentioned that they’d been to the same top Scottish public school, even though they were discussing whether it mattered that David Cameron had been to an English one.

I was at that Scottish school, too. Decades had passed, though, so our paths didn’t cross. I remember Marr coming back once, to give us a talk on how we could all become editor of the Independent. Alas, none of us yet has.

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Darling was altogether more distant. There was a story, probably apocryphal, about a group of boys on a school trip to London spotting him across the central lobby of the House of Commons.