True story

Forgive the name-dropping but this is a true story.

One afternoon in 1984 I returned to the first floor flat that I shared with two other people in London.

Sitting alone on the sofa watching TV was a young man called Dougie Smith.

I knew him but Dougie wasn’t a flatmate. He didn’t have a key and no-one else was at home. So how had he got in?

Well, with impressive ingenuity, he had climbed up a drain pipe and, like a cat burglar, slipped in through an open window before making himself comfortable.

Today, 37 years later, the Telegraph Magazine ran a feature that described Dougie Smith as one half of ‘the most powerful couple in Downing Street (you’ve never heard of)’.

You couldn’t make it up.