Even the gossip is partial. Absent from index and text alike, for example, is Marina Hyde, the younger journalist with whom Morgan is widely believed to have had an affair (I know Marina a little, and she has always resolutely denied it to me; I don’t call her a liar) and whose firing from the Sun is an important part of the background to Morgan’s feud with David Yelland. She appears only in the acknowledgments, by first name: ‘Marina, my best friend … unpaid but razor-sharp proof reader’. Did she help with the text? She’s a very good writer and The Insider is, intermittently, better written than Morgan’s column in the Standard. At one point, Morgan writes, ‘My computer messages amused.’ That fey, intransitive use of the verb ‘to amuse’ is a Hyde hallmark both in conversation and in print.