But we were there to talk about squid. Ms Nathan donned a new hat this year: the chairmanship of a little-known body that advises ministers on animal experimentation, the Animal Procedures Committee (APC). This former Editor of Channel 4 News is on something of a mission: to open up a subject that the British find almost unbearable to discuss in any reasonable way.

So we sat facing our subject in a bright, white room, prodding her with pointed questions to see what sort of reaction we might get. “It is very difficult, full of knotty problems, but coming from a background as a journalist, I fundamentally believe that more, good, accurate information helps all sorts of democratic processes, governmental processes, all sorts, and that is why I am talking to you, to slight gasps.”

Her job may be about animals, how to protect as well as to exploit them, but her problems are all human. Those gasps echoing around Whitehall at the very idea of her giving an interview are from those, weary of the militant tactics of animal rights extremists, wanting to keep their heads down, and hers too. That approach means that until now details of medical research on animals have been kept as dry and dusty, and therefore as inaccessible to the general public, as possible.

That is not what Ms Nathan wants. She was the first woman to edit a national news programme, cites one of her hobbies as “embarrassing my children” and is determined that Britain should become as honest as possible about what is going on behind the locked gates of the fortified laboratories. This is not because what she has found there in the months since she took up the job is so appalling. Quite the opposite.

“When I did go, it was more OK than I thought it was going to be,” she said. “A lot of those images go back a long way — the smoking beagles was the Seventies. This is why I am in favour of more information and more openness. I came into it with the usual, not much more than the public, view. I was expecting to be a little more shocked than I have been.”

Is this drive to openness brave or naive? The public generally does not like to contemplate the experimentation done in its name, for its benefit, and those most interested in gory details are the often-violent extremists. But Ms Nathan thinks that we can be treated like grownups. She says that the mystery over what goes on has created only an unjustified air of menace.

Although she could not carry out any of the procedures (“I’m not sure I could do that to anybody”) she has watched them without squeamishness. She witnessed an anaesthetised rat being cut open, and saw another rat that had been operated on an hour earlier, “and it was running around, it looked OK”. She has seen experiments on primates such as macaques, the use of which is particularly controversial because they are imported on long, stressful flights, but also because they are considered highly intelligent and even, some claim, capable of almost human emotions.

“I saw something where the animal was subjected to a procedure that was repeated, that had a bang associated with it. There was a noise, and we all jumped. But it was quite obvious it wasn’t hurting because the second time the bang happened, it didn’t jump. It wasn’t injuring it, it wasn’t hurting it at all, it wasn’t scared. It was held fairly lovingly on sheepskin, and when they’d finished they gave it a piece of fruit and it went into a big area it was playing in.”

Although Ms Nathan would ideally like to see an end to animal experimentation, she said that she was not an “anti” and, unlike her predecessor, did not think that it would be reasonable to set a target for reduction. This is just as well: 2.9 million scientific procedures on animals were begun last year, a rise of 41,300 on 2004. Although most of the animals involved are rodents, the number of primates used in Britain is rising: last year 3,120 primates were used in animal experiments, up 12 per cent on 2004.

Ms Nathan’s approach is what she might call sensible, a word she uses a lot. “I think it is a necessary evil. I think we probably do need to experiment and test on animals in order to develop safe medicines, but it is not something that either I or society should relish . . . It is not something we should do recklessly or lightly.”

And perhaps we ought to admit more of our own responsibility for it. When asked if the British are sentimental about animals, she exclaimed: “We know we are.” She is drawn to a radical proposal that would put a new label on medicines, saying: “This product is tested on animals.”

“It would make you think, wouldn’t it? I mean we individually would have to take responsibility,” she said. “It could be irresponsible if it put people off taking the medicines that made them better, you wouldn’t want to do that. But someone floated the idea, and I thought instinctively, ‘That is interesting’.”

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