Saturday evening at Aye Write!, Glasgow’s gallus book festival, and the Baroness Bakewell of Stockport is in full flight. The Mitchell Theatre is pretty well sold out, and the audience mainly comprises groupies of the woman once dubbed the thinking man’s crumpet. A good gig to chair, I mused, as Joan fluently responded to questions on her new memoir Stop The Clocks. What could possibly go wrong?

Well nothing much at the time. She dealt with schoolgirl lust, university drinking habits (sherry!), the incidence of casual sexual harassment in the media of the 60’s and 70’s and how folks of a certain age – she’s an impossibly glamorous 82 – prepared for the inevitable day they’d fall off their perch. And she slapped me down with steely eyed charm when I injudiciously inquired what a left leaning woman was doing in the unelected House of Lords.

It was the last of three events I was chairing that day, so I trundled off into the night weary but not unhappy with the last hurrah of the evening. And then I woke up on Sunday morning to the news that Joan Bakewell was headline news because of highly controversial remarks she’d made in the Sunday Times about anorexia. Why you wouldn’t find eating disorders in a refugee camp. Why the explosion of eating disorders was a symptom of a narcissistic society.

Not a word of which passed her lips or impinged on my consciousness during our allotted hour. Wish she’d flagged that up during the interview I thought, not for the first time. In this game timing is all and it makes you look a bit of chump if you don’t seize on the one issue for which she’d hit the front pages. Except that the front pages were the morning after the night before.

Later that morning she popped up on various news broadcasts heavily engaged in damage limitation as anorexia sufferers past and present lined up to diss her judgement. She insisted that she had given no such interview to the Sunday Times, and what she’d said were off the cuff, off the record remarks made in private to a journalist.

Which prompts two thoughts. As a highly experienced journalist and interviewer herself, it’s a trap into which you’d never expect her to tumble. But it’s also a reflection on quite a lot of contemporary journalism. Good journalists, honest journalists, understand that off the record means just that. If you break that code, rest assured that the contact or celebrity whom you’ve hung out to dry will never pick up a phone call from you again. Or trust anything you write.

But bad journalists, opportunistic journalists don’t give much of a stuff about any of that. They sniff a good yarn, or a saleable quote and they go for it. A young journalist working for the news desk of what was then Britain’s biggest selling Sunday title once explained to me in a pub how she’d perfected her modus operandi.

She would go to the subject of a current story or alleged scandal and blag her way through their front door. Then she’d explain to the poor sod that they had two options: give their side of the saga to her and maybe turn up in a bad story. Or refuse and she’d send someone who’d do a much worse one. What a charmer. Her newspaper closed in the middle of the phone hacking stramash. I do hope she had a problem finding fresh employment.