Like Marina Hyde, Amol Rajan, Vanessa Feltz, Holly Willoughby, et al, I have a massive personal announcement to make. But I’ve decided not to make it right here and now in this floral tent on a green top field of the prinked, landscaped grounds of Hauser & Wirth, Bruton.

The tent is nice and full for the inaugural Big Brue festival of ideas, and from the podium I scan the murmuring sea of moleskin, tweed, French workman’s bleus, blonde highlights and stubble. There’s Bob Geldof grinning at the back, Tim Bevan, the film producer, near the front… Then the writer and broadcaster Misha Glenny makes a start.

I glance down at the programme to refresh myself as to what panel I’m on, and, oh yes, here we are – it’s ‘Truth-Telling in a Fake News World’. If you’re wondering, as many do when they see me, ‘What are you doing here?’, I’ve been subbed in for Sally Walker, not The Salt Path one, but the former spy chief at GCHQ, who led the National Cyber Force, who is otherwise detained.

To my right sits a fidgety Freddie Sayers, the delicious don of UnHerd and this magazine’s publisher, to my left, in low-slung Levi’s, James Harding, the editor-in-chief of the Observer. I explain I’m not Sally Walker and go on to say that in the green room Misha – who has the most wonderful, orchestral voice – had said it was a shame because she would have been very interesting.

When he gets to me, Glenny asks me about the abuse I must get on social media. I say I try never to read below the line as even in the Times the comments, if not the readers, of course, are vile; but then I say, that’s not the scary part. The newest, scariest part of this moment in time is the pivot to journalists and broadcasters hoping and relying on punters to pay them in person to read or listen to what they write or say. It’s against nature. Or my nature, anyway. That’s why my Substack – The Rachel Johnson Papers – is almost free.

When I started out it was a simpler world. You worked for some mogul, dirty digger, a titan of the inky trade. You had a byline and a salary. If things went well, a photo byline. Then a column. Then your own newspaper or mag (when I edited the Lady I said ‘I always wanted a title’). Then hacks became brands. That is now not enough. My most ambitious and successful mates are transitioning from brands to behemoths, so instead of buying your copy of the Telegraph or Spectator or Wall Street Journal or whatever, you subscribe to them.

‘I far prefer writing for legacy media like newspapers,’ I tell the lunchtime Somerset crowd. ‘If you don’t like asking people for anything, and I don’t, imagine the horror of asking strangers for cold hard cash to make bank. And imagine the continuous, cortisol-spiking jeopardy of being the product – not just the talent, but the content creator, the publisher, the PR, the promoter of said content.’ Think of being, as Marina Hyde’s new site’s name advertises, Always On.

A podcast turns you into a predator. Instead of enjoying an encounter, I’d size up every woman I met

The previous day I’d hosted a Big Brue panel called ‘Difficult Women’, as I also do a podcast of that name, with my guests, the co-founder of the Big Brue, Mariella Frostrup, and Lindsay Skoll, principal of Jesus College, Oxford.

I didn’t say at the time that this was the last Difficult Women event. Why? Well as everyone keeps saying, we are in the attention economy, and it’s true – people are over-saturated and oversubscribed. I’m giving Difficult Women up after several years and hundreds of interviews.

Not only do I feel this pudeur about presuming on people’s time, a weekly podcast turns you into a classic predator. Instead of enjoying some encounter, I’d size up every woman I met as a potential supplier of ‘content’. And whenever I saw my many competitors snap up a Nigella or Hillary or Malala, a little bit of me would die. So it’s not, as both my husband and my managing editor at Global have tenderly enquired, because I’ve ‘run out of interesting women to ask’. Haha – no. And I loved doing it. But as a public service I’m not doing a weekly podcast. Or turning into a multi-platform brand. I’m still working for the man! Told you it was huge.

The panel gets on to an energetic debate about BBC Verify and trust in the news in the age of AI. It seems to me the problem is not that some things are fake, it’s that everything is deniable. You see an incredible photograph and instead of saying ‘Is that a Don McCullin?’ you ask: ‘Is that AI?’ Glenny wraps it up.

Everyone claps, and I stay seated for the next event on the New World Order.