We journalists can only chase one ambulance at a time

What I really wanted to do for you this week was uncover a totally new story about a racist paedophile banker — a perfect storm of a story which through the sheer magnitude of the mass national hysteria it engendered actually brought about a lethal fracturing of the earth’s crust, volcanic eruptions, rivers of sulphurous lava etc. ‘I was only 14 when he walked into my bedroom with his huge bonus and called me a darkie,’ my ideal interviewee — the whistleblower — would have begun, at least in my foetid and grasping imagination.

It’s how our minds work, we hacks, I suppose. When I first began in the job 32 years ago, as a reporter for the South Wales Echo, my then girlfriend observed that whenever an ambulance went by with its siren blaring I would immediately look up with an expression on my face which she could only describe as ‘pleased’.