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POLITICS is never far away in Washington DC. So I shouldn't have been surprised when, as a newly arrived DC resident, I discovered that the nearest shop - no, I should correct myself, nearest store - was a Safeway supermarket situated in the dim caverns of perhaps the most name-checked address in the environs. No, not the Capitol, or the White House or the Pentagon, but the Watergate complex.

When I was a journalism student in the mid-1970s, the Watergate story served as a role model for pioneering investigative journalism. All The President's Menwas required reading. We knew all the twists and turns in the labrynthine process by which Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, under the stewardship of doughty Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, helped to topple the Nixon administration.