Journalists will be the next target of public anger, and rightly so

There is a danger in writing columns that you destroy everything. You begin by gleefully attacking your enemies, then you begin to attack your friends. You end up attacking yourself, like one of those nematode worms which, in a witless sexual frenzy, stabs itself to death with its own penis. This is the fate that awaits all of us scribblers — and fair enough, I suppose. So this week, then, halfway there: friends.

In fairness, Andrew Gilligan was never a very close friend of mine — we didn’t, you know, hang out. But I employed him as a reporter at the BBC Today programme and admired him as, I think, the finest investigative journalist I’ve come across. You may remember him from that ticklish little contretemps with the government back in 2003, when he suggested that Blair and Campbell had knowingly exaggerated the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein and had misrepresented the intelligence from the security services.