In August 1999 I was a 25-year-old stocks and shares journalist. I did not have a clue what I was doing. I like to think that makes me one of the good guys, an innocent swept up in the maelstrom of dotcom speculation. In truth it made me into a kind of collaborator, happy to be wined and dined and to repeat the lines that I was spun to a credulous and excited public. I was naive enough not to realize that regular lunches at London’s finest restaurants do not come free; that there is always a reason, and that someone is always paying.

I was a young reporter at the newly formed Shares Magazine. I liked the job. I liked the deal it came with even more: being handed the first gin and tonic as the hour hand crept towards one; riding across London in the back of a black Mercedes, on the way to air my views in a television studio at Bloomberg or the Money Channel; the buzz of young colleagues and new technology and the sense that the world was changing for the better. I liked the fact that a mysterious woman called Bella, whom I never met, used to telephone me regularly for syndicated radio news bulletins that I was never up early enough to hear. Most of all, I liked the smell of money being made and believed that somehow, in a small way, some of it could be mine. A fellow scribe, equally well qualified, had landed the precious small companies correspondent job at a prestigious news outlet. In this, his first job after university, he would find himself speaking to a chief executive on one line, with a stream of callers trying to get him on another, his mobile ringing, thrown in a drawer. On one occasion he tipped a small firm and saw the shares rise 50 per cent, adding £11 million to its market capitalization. ‘At the age of 24’, he says, ‘that was a big deal.’