This week “Nick”, the single source for the lurid allegations about a “top people’s paedophile ring” that the police’s Operation Midland was until recently investigating, has been charged with paedophile-related offences.

Sometimes the scales fall from your eyes. You wonder what the hell your fellow-humans could be thinking. For one little boy in the storybooks that moment arrived when he saw the crowd applauding a naked emperor’s new clothes.

For me it came in 2014 when a news agency called Exaro began selling, and the respectable media began buying, stories whose anonymous source the Metropolitan police were calling Nick. Nick (claiming to be a victim of abuse when young, and helping Exaro) was naming members of an alleged establishment paedophile ring operating at the ultra-posh