Browsing my local Oxfam, my eye was drawn to a faded hardcover with the title The Merry Wives of Westminster. As some readers may know, my Twitter handle is @WestminsterWAG, so I bought it for the princely sum of £2.99. It wasn’t until I got home and started reading it that I realised who the author was: Marie Belloc, sister of Hilaire, a successful novelist in her own right. Married to the Times journalist Frederick Lowndes, she died in 1947; this little book was published in 1946. She writes with clarity and confidence on the SW1 of her day, but what’s fascinating are the parallels with modern life: the money worries, the snobberies and snubbings, the late-night working practices of Fleet Street’s finest, the professional rivalries. She even talks about being ‘ghosted’ by her husband, a term I had thought solely the preserve of the modern millennial. At the front of the book I find an Ex-Libris: ‘Hugh Et Antonia Fraser.’ A quick check confirms it: before Harold Pinter, the historian Lady Antonia was married to Hugh. Two great women writers for £2.99. Not bad going at all.

I relay this to my old colleague and screenwriter friend in LA, Sean Macaulay (he wrote the Eddie the Eagle movie and like me also has a political past, being the brother of Sarah Macaulay, wife of Gordon Brown), with whom I am cooking up a small project. He laughs. ‘I met Lady Antonia once,’ he says. ‘I said to her: “I have a Harold Pinter remote control for my TV.” “Oh?” she replied. “Yes. It has a pause button… and a menacing pause button.” She did not appreciate my joke.’ Sorry Lady A, I’m afraid I laughed like a drain.

I was in Oxfam in the first place by way of killing half an hour before lunch with my new TV boyfriend, Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror. Lately he and I have started doing the Wednesday night paper review on Sky News (it’s the closest to a date I get these days), alongside Anna Botting. I’m a pale substitute for his previous bf, my Daily Mail colleague Andrew Pierce, who has his own morning show on GB News; nevertheless, Kevin and I seem to get along surprisingly well, despite the fact he is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist and I am… well, not so much. This has not stopped him nicknaming me ‘Red Sarah’ every time I voice a view that is not firmly to the right of Genghis Khan, which amuses me greatly – especially since my alma mater, journalistically speaking, is his organ.

I recall once, when working on the TV desk in the old Mirror offices in New Fetter Lane, picking up the phone to a reader. ‘Hello, TV listings?’ I said, in my most professional how-can-I help-you voice. There was a pause. ‘What the hell are you doing working for the Mirror? You sound like bloody Princess Diana! And to think this used to be a socialist newspaper. Tsk.’ And he slammed the phone down. I fear it was then that sales began to go into terminal decline.

In Belloc’s day the saying was ‘never judge a book by its cover’. ‘Never judge a person by a tweet’ might be a more modern alternative. Entire careers can be erased by an unguarded thought, as Diane Abbott, erstwhile Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, found out this week. Admittedly in her case it was not a tweet but the old-fashioned equivalent, a letter to the Observer, that did for her, a brief missive in which she misguidedly argued that the racism experienced by Jews, Irish and Traveller people was not as egregious as that experienced by people of colour. It was an ignorant and erroneous statement, and highly offensive to many. It also smacked of anti-Semitism, something that has plagued the Labour party in recent years. Politically, then, Sir Keir Starmer was right to withdraw the whip almost immediately. Morally, though, I don’t want to see her cancelled. I don’t like the woman or her politics, and by all accounts she doesn’t like me either. She’s tribal, stubborn, and it beggars belief that anyone ever thought she could be home secretary. But she did issue a full and, to my mind, sincere-sounding apology – and that should be taken into account. I also think it’s worth remembering that Abbott, as one of Britain’s first black MPs, has endured a lifetime of prejudice because of her skin colour. It is not unreasonable to think this may have had a long-lasting effect on her. We are all formed by our experiences. I’m not trying to justify it, merely to say one should always try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before condemning them outright.