I must leave for Baghdad immediately, for these are great times in which to practise the exalted trade of journalism. Out there in the charred and smouldering ruins of Iraq, there are incriminating files. Millions of them, by the look of it. Just lying around the place, waiting to be chanced upon by any opportunistic hack, however inept and addled. Book me a flight: this is All The Presidents Men and Hitler's Diaries all rolled into one. Except that unlike Hitler's Diaries, these files are, of course, wholly authentic. This is the real stuff. And it's just lying around there. I can feel my nostrils twitching like they did in the old days when I was a trainee journalist and an ambulance happened to go by. The scent of blood: I feel reinvigorated.
The scoops I'm talking about are the stories EVERYBODY has been talking about. That great one about how a bunch of documents had been discovered which proved that George Galloway MP was on the Iraqi payroll all along, just as we'd suspected. Saddam apparently bunged Galloway loads of dosh every month - millions, I think, probably - and crates of Russian champagne, sevruga caviar, plus exotic and illegal unguents to make his moustache even more luxuriant and imposing. The lucky reporter found the documents in downtown Baghdad tucked inside a cabinet labelled (in English): DO NOT OPEN: EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL STUFF ABOUT THAT IDIOT GALLOWAY'S LINKS WITH SADDAM.
Incredible. Hell of a scoop. And it was just there, waiting to be found. That reporter could have been me.
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