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The trainee was an experiment. The managing editor of the National Courier considered the trainee perhaps the crowning achievement of his career.

This morning, the trainee’s job was to sit by the window that looked onto the street outside the National Courier and watch until he saw the silver Mercedes containing the editor. At that point he had to go – ‘quickly, but not running’ – to the managing editor’s office and tell him. In the roughly one hundred seconds between the car being spotted and Ken Cooper shouldering his way through the revolving doors, the managing editor was able to summon the foreign editor, the business editor, the features editor and the sports editor. They would be waiting in the foyer with pointlessly ingratiating smiles as Cooper made his way to the lift.

‘Just under the million. Eight per cent down on last year, and ten per cent since the spring promotion,’ said the managing editor.

‘Fuck off. We’ve cut the price in the Midlands, and we’re still going down the toilet? The Telegraph’s only seven per cent down; Guardian, seven per cent down. Thought about hiring some journalists?’

The managing editor did not need to hire any journalists. But he did not tell Ken Cooper that.

The foreign editor was next in line. ‘We’ve completely ignored the Malaysian typhoon, boss. Twenty thousand dead, and not even a line on the front.’

‘Fuck off. That twenty thousand included a rich couple from Chelsea and their son who’d just started at Harrow. The Daily Mail had it. We didn’t. Your fault. Not mine.’

Then the business editor: ‘A cracking story from Sir Solomon Dundas, boss. They’re going to split up that Scottish bank after all.’

‘Fuck off. Dundas is a self-promoting wanker. His last tip was crap. I don’t want another story with his sticky fingers on it in this newspaper, ever.’

The features editor was offering six of the best chocolate recipes, an article about why Bloody Marys were back in vogue, and an interview with Mia Farrow’s son. Ken told him to fuck off and come back with something fucking interesting.

The sports editor, a lean, gnarled man with a bald head and rimless glasses, got him just before the lift doors opened. ‘Boss?’

‘Yes?’ said Ken.

‘Nothing really … Just – fuck off, boss.’

Ken laughed. He was beginning to feel better.

Exactly the same performance took place every morning. These days there was less tension than usual, because there was only one story in town. Everybody at the National Courier knew that the front page would be referendum, referendum, referendum. The cartoon would be referendum. The comment pages would contain referendum yes and referendum no. The editorial would be referendum maybe.

There were still twenty-five minutes before the morning editorial conference. Time enough for the foreign editor to tell his key staff to fuck off and bring him something interesting; for the business editor to tell his banking correspondent to fuck off and stop depending on the same old sources; for the features editor to tell everyone who worked for him that they were fucking useless; and for the sports editor to smoke three cigarettes. In this way, a great newspaper was coming together.

Nobody told the trainee to fuck off. Nobody even knew the trainee’s name. He was a well-dressed young man in his early twenties, with beautifully cut hair, neat nails and a degree in journalism studies. He possessed, as all journalists must, a plausible manner, a little literary ability and a good deal of rat-like cunning. Despite these advantages, he was known only as ‘oi’. When he protested about this to the managing editor, the managing editor quite truthfully explained that his name did not matter, since nobody would ever need to know it. Like him, most of the younger journalists at the Courier were work-experience trainees who lived at home with their parents in Ealing, Primrose Hill or Highgate. Because the paper was prestigious and jobs in journalism were almost impossible to find, none of them was actually being paid. Everybody benefited from this arrangement. Their parents could boast to their friends about their children’s prestigious jobs. The paper got a steady supply of free labour. And the trainees quite enjoyed themselves. Occasionally the managing editor allowed himself to think of the many thousands of bright young people from poorer families who would never get the chance to work in journalism – but not for too long, because he knew that the current system made perfect economic sense.

One day as he was sitting at his desk, the managing editor had found himself wondering whether, as wealthy parents were clearly willing to subsidise their offspring, some of them might be prepared to go further, and actually pay the Courier to employ them. So the trainee’s banker father was currently paying £30,000 in return for his son working at the paper. He regarded it as money well spent: if he paid £100,000 for a painting so he could boast about it at dinner parties, and many times that on dull holidays so he could boast about them, £30,000 was a small price to pay to allow him to boast about his dim but well-meaning son’s journalistic career. Half of the money was going into the newspaper’s coffers; the other half was going to the managing editor. The managing editor feared that one day Ken Cooper would discover what was going on; and that would be an unpleasant day. So the trainee could not stay forever. He was just an experiment. In the meantime, everybody called him ‘oi’. The trainee, who dreamed of being a gossip columnist, was not put off, however. He had sticking power. He passionately believed that one day, somehow, someone would tell him too to fuck off.