There’s a particularly ungainly pub on the River Thames called Doggett’s. To most people it’s an eyesore (although it’s quite nice inside); but if I’m crossing Blackfriars Bridge and it catches my eye, I always get a warm glow.

It was in this pub, in the summer of 2017, that I – a former journalist who had become a diplomat-apparatchik at the Australian High Commission – was having a beer with an old Australian Financial Review mentor of mine from the 1990s, Michael Stutchbury, who had later become the paper’s editor-in-chief.