If you’re reading this, either you got to your newsagent even earlier than usual or the mysterious bulk news buyers of Weston-super-Mare have given up. The latter is more likely, but until the motives of the two men who bought up 1,400 copies of Monday’s North Somerset edition of the Bristol Evening Post at a cost of £500 have been conclusively established, no newspaper can be considered immune.

Meanwhile, here’s the theory: fearful of a front-page story about being fined for hosting cockroaches in their Chinese restaurant, Cam and Kiem Mu — unquestionably successful in the hospitality business — branched out into news management. Their apparent modus operandi was heavy-handed and plain heavy. Two men, so far unidentified, visited 40 newsagents within a 20-mile radius of the brothers’ offending Sea Palace restaurant and at each one bought up the entire remaining stock of evening papers. When asked why, they claimed (wrongly) that it contained a cherished George Best funeral story.

Alastair Campbell would have rolled his eyes, not necessarily at the intent but at the execution. For the Evening Post publishes in Bristol as well as North Somerset. The story hit the streets up and down the Avon Gorge, and then went national.

Cover-ups always backfire, unless done properly. The Mus — or anyone else with bad news to bury — are welcome to try buying up an entire edition of The Times, but it will cost them about £500,000. They should also consider chewing through the fibre-optic cables that send times-online into the ether. Now there’s a job for a well-trained cockroach.