Zigzag gained a candid confession from Jameson when, earlier this week, I posed an a vacuum cleaner salesman and gained entry to his home – a basement flat in an insalubrious west London street well known to the police for its drug addicts and squatters.

I realised my cover was successful when Jameson’s attractive wife invited me in and offered me a cup of coffee and a hobnob.

I began by quizzing Jameson on his relationship with Sid Yobbo, the cartoon thug said to be based on Jameson created by the leading current affairs weekly Private Eye. Jameson’s libel suit against them resulted in his incurring £75,000 costs.

"The upper class twits of Private Eye take the view that anyone who leaves school at fourteen in the East End of London has got to be a yob and have a name like Sid."

Jameson broke down and wept at my feet. Resisting this obvious play for my sympathies, I continued probing in the uncompromising manner demanded by you, the Zigzag reader.

"Sid Yobbo has caused me a great deal of pain because I hope I'm a bit more caring, knowing and thoughtful than that image assumes. It was in defence of my dignity that I got involved in that dreadful libel action. The jury decided it was inflammatory but not malicious. In other words, they didn’t think that image was far off the mark.

"This is how it's been all through my life. Linda Lee Potter in the Daily Mail got it right when she said I was hypersensitive. She said I was boring, loud mouthed, cared for nobody and then said ‘what's he got to be so hypersensitive about?’. I’m on the council of the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) but you don’t see that in print because I don’t make a fuss about it. It’s a double-edge sword, on the one hand Mr Nice Guy, on the other, Sid Yobbo."

Not for the only time during our meeting, he spoke openly of his sordid boyhood amid the slums of east London.

"I didn't get much of a formal education. I went to a school were there were 350 boys and three teachers. My last term was spent teaching the others how to telI the time. But the most powerful influences on me were not my education and the East End but the novels of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis – the American giants. When I was 13, I won a big essay competition that set me on the road to journalism.

"At fourteen I got a job as an outside messenger in Fleet Street, so determined was I to be a top journalist. I finished up as managing editor of the Daily Mail, editor of the Daily Express and launched the Daily Star and finally got fired by Rupert Murdoch from the News of the World.

"I’ve really come up the hard way. When I was a kid I was begging in the street for money to buy a bit of bread. People of that type of background care about suffering."

A solemn violin concerto breaks out from the cheap music centre at the side of his living room, beside a rather tasteless chaise longue.

Yielding to my relentless demands for the truth, Jameson eventually owned up to some highly unsavoury political beliefs. I was deeply shocked and wanted to leave but in the interests of honest reporting, I stayed.

"I’m anti establishment. Most of my life I’ve been on the left politically, now I consider myself a free-roving anarchist. I don’t support any party and I’m against all politicians. I loath and detest bureaucracy. What cripples me is the thought that there an half a million kids walking about without jobs, hope or prospects. That rings a big bell in my head, reminding me of the situation I was in when I was a youngster.

"I can never say a word in favour of the politicians who’ve created this situation and nor will I until they solve it. What we have here is Ireland all over again. I was Irish editor of the Mirror for several years and know the scene quite well – as well as any Englishman can. The circumstances which created the conflagration in Ireland are being sown on the streets of urban Britain.

"When the whole lot goes up, it’ll be like a gigantic bomb and all the politicians will be scratching their heads wondering what happened. They spend ninety percent of their time slagging each other off.

"If I were a politician – God forbid – I’d take my inspiration from people like Franklin Roosevelt and do everything humanely as possible to bring about a regeneration, a New Deal just he did in 1930s America. In other words, a bit of inspiration and leadership. We’re ruled by pygmies!"

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly for one so long at the helm of several, he fends off my allegations that newspapers can influence the opinions of the electorate.

"When I’ve gone around the country and asked the people what they think of my papers, unfailingly they say ‘RUBBISH!’ The British public has a healthy disregard for British papers. I like that, it shows they decide what they think and feel. I always laugh at the ridiculous idea that the British public take a lead from what they read in the papers. These days I suppose they take more from the TV."

Recently, of course, Jameson has been on TV. I’m about to remind him of this when he continues:

"After one election recently, a MORI poll found that 53 percent of the readership of The Sun thought It was a Labour paper. Ha ha ha! So don’t tell me what the British press do to the public. I’ve just proved to you that it’s not so. That’s another myth created by the posher end of the market, the serious newspapers and magazines."

Again, I'm about to point out that polls prove nothing and ask what a newspaper might be if it isn’t “serious” when the violin concerto squealing from the music centre (next to the tasteless chaise longue) begins its second movement.

Visibly moved, Jameson says:

"Fourteen-year-old's today are still babies. By that age I'd started work. In fact, when I was seven I was working on the street markets to make any kind of money to but a bit of bread. I think what I did was a tremendous achievement. I can’t think of anyone else from such Iowly beginnings who ended up running four national newspapers.

"I’ve always been actively engaged in survival. I had to survive two years when Murdoch fired me and I lost all my money in the libel case. I’ve always aimed to get as far away from the spectre of poverty as possible. Within a year I’d become a household name, a national institution. And now I’ve landed one of the top jobs in radio... the motor keeps running."

Myself, the photographer, and a toy souvenir-of-Tenerife doll perched on the mantelpiece are shaken by unforced admission by Jameson of his desire to have written books.

"I would like to have been a great novelist. That got suppressed by the business of making a living. I would rather have been a novelist. I look back and sometimes think I shouldn’t have been doing certain things because they weren’t me. It was very difficult being someone on the left running a Tory newspaper like the Express although I found more socialists on the Express than I did on the Mirror. I wouldn’t say I hated it but it was a job I did an a professional journalist. I’ll do anything which is reasonably acceptable if it means survival."

But even that didn’t prepare us for the revelation which was to follow.

"I would like to have been a psychiatrist."

I was left speechless and could feel the fierce pounding of my heart against the bogus restaurant receipts stuffed into my wallet. He went on:

"I’m very interested in human behaviour and what makes people tick. I’m taken up with things that disturb, hurt, cause doubt, anxiety, grief. I would like to write a book about people and the strange things they do. I ought to write the great working class novel of the end of the 20th century. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist of the 1990s – but I don’t suppose I will."

After one of the strangest encounters in all my years of investigative reporting, I felt I was ready for anything. Indeed, it came as no surprise when Jameson confided:

"I like punks! They’ve quite grown on me actually. When you compare them to the people who massacred forty people at the Heysel stadium why should anyone complain about punks? They’re bright, colourful, lively, interested. They’ve turned their backs on conventional society in the same way Hell’s Angels did in the past.

"They just happen to be the latest in a long line of young people who are thirsty, aggressive, who have seen the system and didn’t like the look of it. They want to do something different so dress up in all their tribal finery. Good luck to ‘em. Great! In fact, I’d like to be a punk myself but at the age of 56 I’m getting on a bit to go about with a Mohican haircut."