Perhaps he was bullied: sweet little boys often are, though rather less at Eton than at most comparable establishments. This I was glad to do, and received from him a most charmingly grateful note of thanks - quite a collector's piece since, once he became editor of the Sunday Telegraph, charming notes of appreciation to me became rare.The rot may have set in at Eton where something awful must have happened, since he hated the place and was taken away after only one term. I shall never forget how adorably sweet Dominic and his sister Nigella looked in their little sailor's suits. Nor can I have made all that much of a bad impression on him since when his mother died, tragically young, he asked me to write the appreciation for the Spectator, where he was already a uniquely youthful deputy editor. His enchanting mother, Vanessa - then still the wife of his father, Nigel - brought him to stay in Wivenhoe where my first wife and I had a small house.

To say the knives were out for Dominic last week would be an understatement. Not only were they out, but sharpened, poisoned and pointed as well.Why so? What is wrong with the poor man? I have long pondered this question, still smarting from the scurvy treatment I received at his hand Our relations had begun so well. So, yes, I do bear him a grudge, in common, I fear, with many other journalists. Hence the eagerness with which last week's smear was seized upon by the media, in revealing contrast with the easy ride the media gave to the affable Richard Gott, the Guardian's journalist, when he was exposed in late 1994 as having KGB contacts by the Spectator, then, of course, edited by Dominic Lawson.

In these journalistic security dealings God, quite as much as the Devil, is in the detail, and therefore no one who is not wholly in the particular picture is in a position to judge - particularly those, like myself, whose own cupboards contain at least one or two mini-skeletons. In short, ignore all that MI6 malarkey about Dominic, which is the least interesting aspect of this immensely unlovable, if also immensely talented, fellow, with whom, as it happens, I have not been on speaking terms since, three years ago, unceremoniously and without a word of regret, he sacked me from the Sunday Telegraph, where, as one of its founding fathers, I had worked for more than 30 years. Not that this means that he never had any journalistic dealings with the security services: most of us did, and rightly so, during the Cold War. Mine tended to be with the CIA, and only occasionally with the KGB - all such dealings in my view being completely legitimate and even patriotic in the grim circumstances of the period. In real life it is always the lovable figures who suddenly get laid low, never the unlovable ones, such as Dominic Lawson, on whom we would so much prefer the fateful blow to fall. So let me start by stating categorically that the story about the 42-year-old editor of the Sunday Telegraph being an agent of MI6 is a non-starter, if only because he is too devoted an agent of his family to have time left to serve any less well-deserving cause.