included Harold Nicolson, John Betjeman, Randolph Churchill, Malcolm Muggeridge and Peter Fleming, brother of the 007 novelist Ian. Gentlemen first and journalists second, not all of them had the makings of a good diarist. A young John Betjeman once came bursting into the editor's office in a state of great excitement. "Please, Sir, I think I've got one of those scoop things!" cried the future poet laureate. "Oh really", replied his editor, "and how do you know it's a scoop?" "Well, Sir, I've rung the Evening News and they haven't got it." Other diarists were a little more serious about the task in hand and veteran Daily Mirror journalist Donald Zec recalled being in a certain amount of awe when dropping by the Diary as a rookie reporter. "They generally wore horn-rimmed spectacles, hairy tweed jackets and corduroys and called each other 'Old Boy' a lot" wrote Zec. "Just to hover in the room where they worked – or plotted – was instructive."<ref>Zec, Donald. "Fiddlin' my way to Fleet Street", British Journalism Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2000</ref> In 1928 the Diary's editor was Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former spy known for his hard-drinking and semi-debauched lifestyle, who would later become a best-selling author with his Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). Lockhart had been Britain's first spy in Moscow and, despite having been caught and exchanged for a Soviet agent, remained on unusually cordial terms with the Russian Embassy in London, from whom he received an annual gift of caviar. Harold Nicolson It was Lockhart who – having been promoted to a more wide-ranging role by Beaverbrook – suggested that his friend the aristocrat, ex-diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson might be the ideal man to take over the Diary. But the easy pleasure that Nicolson took in socialising for its own sake quickly evaporated when forced to attend festivities in search of stories. "Work fruitlessly, superficially, futilely upon the Londoner’s Diary" he wrote in his private journal. "The difficulty is that the only news I get is from friends and that is just the news that I can't publish." Although the money was good, the aristocratic Nicolson disapproved of his shamelessly power-hungry proprietor and found Fleet Street "culturally degrading". His superior attitude did not go unnoticed. "Harold’s tastes are not the public's tastes", lamented Lockhart. "He is all too precious." Beaverbrook however, did not agree. In June 1931, the