Something I’ve realised that I’m good at — I think, anyway — is getting characters’ voices. When I wrote Big Finish Doctor Who stories for instance, the Doctor is always the Doctor, but Peter Davison’s Fifth speaks and acts very differently to Colin Baker’s Sixth. I found it very easy to do the two.

After reading hundreds of Deep Space Nine scripts, I can talk to you like I’m a Klingon. I do not expect this to come up often.

Nor, really, is any of it useful outside of writing. It can actually be embarrassing: in the last year I have picked up and simply cannot shake a verbal tic from “Astrid: Murder in Paris”. The title character keeps saying “ah” in a tight, truncated way and now, apparently, so do I. She also gesticulates with her fingers and while I’ve always been a gesticulator, I’ve seen me doing it too. Mind you, it also exercises fingers that have just spent 12 hours typing, so maybe that one is okay.

But I can’t get ex-Prince Andrew. I also can’t hold in my head his new name, so ex-P will have to do and I will revise this if he ever becomes Prisoner 4642 at his brother’s pleasure. Yesterday when he was arrested was easily the first time I’ve ever followed any royal news other than his interview with Emily Maitlis back in 2019. Michael Sheen got him in “A Very Royal Scandal” by Jeremy Brock from the book by Maitlis, and so did Rufus Sewell in “Scoop” by Peter Moffat from the book by Sam McAlister, both in 2024.

It’s not that I want to be able to talk like ex-P and no one, including me, wants to do an impression. Yet how someone speaks says a lot about how they think. And I’d like to understand how ex-P thinks, I’d like to think about what it was like for him being arrested and held all day yesterday.

Unless your characters are all really yourself — you can argue that Aaron Sorkin’s are and he seems to have done okay — then you need to be able to write ones who see the world in a different way. You have to be able to write ones you don’t like. And if they’re not to be straw men or women, you have to inhabit that mindset, you have to at least briefly, or possibly hopefully briefly, believe that these characters are right. Because they believe they are.

I don’t get the impression that ex-P is big on introspection but he will unquestionably believe he is in the right. I want to know how it feels to be arrested and held when you are certain you’re right. I want to know if there comes a point when you crack and start thinking maybe you were wrong. I want to know what that moment feels like.

And with this guy, I can’t think myself into his position. It is a failing in me as a writer, I realise.

But then even as I’ve been saying this to you and my mind has been so into the dramatic responsibility to write characters, I am of course also acutely aware that I’m talking absolute shite altogether. Here I am, thinking about dialogue, thinking about ex-P, and therefore not thinking of the victims.

That appalls me because it means I’m like so many other people. So much attention on ex-P, on Mandelson, on Epstein. So little thought for the women. Actually, so little thought that Department of Justice is only concentrating on protecting the rich men involved, or at least protecting one of them.

I can’t get ex-P. But apparently in this focusing away from the women involved, I can too easily get the same mindset as every other man.

I need tea.