On being presented with the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year prize at last month’s British Journalism Awards, judges quipped that the Government should “consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead”.

The Independent journalist has nearly 40 years of experience as a foreign correspondent and was credited at the awards with spotting the emergence of the Islamic State “much earlier than anybody else”.

We meet at a coffee shop in Piccadilly around 24 hours after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and Cockburn says he wasn’t surprised by the attack, pointing to the fact that there are “four quite serious wars going on, in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya”.