… the decade being the 1970s, my source again Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia (2009). It is a book of many delights, not least the account of the evening of 5th  April 1976 at 5 Lord North Street, the London home of Harold Wilson. Earlier that day, Wilson resigned as prime minister, and now he has invited two BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtior, to join him for a quiet drink – and to persuade them to investigate the many plots against him, variously ascribed to the KGB, the CIA, MI5, or the Post Office, perhaps all of them. At one point, Wilson says:

I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.