Diary

Monday So exciting! Our lovely Cadbury bluey-purple manifesto is finally ready. The toll it has taken on Mr Letwin is horrific but Jed says a few months in the Austerity Room and he should be back to ‘normal’. (Our head of strategy’s finger quotation marks, not mine.) Mr Willetts jumping up and down with excitement at California-style referendums. Dave a bit cross-patchy about them. He says people had ‘bloody better not start demanding daft things like taking all the traffic lights down. What then, eh?’ Mr Letwin just squeaked. Our Leader also nervous about the ‘be your own boss’ idea. Keeps asking Mr Gove to explain how it won’t mean parents setting up schools that will be rubbish. Mr Gove says ‘N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no!

Monday Am in maternity department of Uniqlo stocking up on affordable, down-to-earth clothes for Sam to wear as she reaches out to ordinary mums during her campaign. Luckily the managers didn’t mind barring ordinary customers from the shop so they could give me a private viewing. Am honoured to be Sam’s press officer and making YouTube films is easy-peasy. You point the camera at her while she’s in the kitchen and say: ‘What are you doing now Sam?’ and she says: ‘Making a cup of tea.’ Then you wait a few minutes and say: ‘What are you doing now Sam?’ and she says: ‘Drinking a cup of tea.’ Dave sits typing on his iMac and every now and again looks up and says something terribly clever.

Monday V dynamic strategy meeting. The challenge is clear: we must look more statesmanlike, whilst wearing Marlon Brando-style leather jackets. Jed is calling it ‘biker statesman chic’. He says Google executives have been doing it for years, there’s nothing to it. We must also find Dave some more budget accessories to wear following excellent coverage of his £1 belt in all the papers this weekend. I have been personally charged with this. Am being dispatched to the high street this lunchtime to find items that will appeal to Recession Strugglers, our key voter type in marginals. A nice pair of socks from Primark perhaps.

Monday Rejoice! Rejoice! That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. I don’t want to gloat, I don’t want to make any obvious points like ‘Gordon, you’re so screwed,’ because that would be in poor taste. V moving moment when Dave came into the office this morning and we all chanted ‘Da-vid Da-vid!’ and made whooping noises. Mr Maude went nuts trying to shut everyone up: ‘We mustn’t be seen holding a baby shower this close to polling day!’ I think Tom had only shouted out ‘We’re alright!’ in a Welsh drawl as a sort of joke. But it wasn’t funny because it gave Mr Maude breathing difficulties. So we all agreed to not mention the happy news in public again. Much. Dave v focused and serious.

Monday Thank goodness! The Great Wobble of 2010 is over!! Never again will I go to Lanzarote so close to an election. Turns out, there wasn’t a single person doing strategy in my absence. Jed was doing brand detox and message aromatherapy, Gary was doing shouting at the press and Mr Letwin was doing sitting in the loo pretending to write the manifesto, as usual (we really must get a move on with that). Thankfully I’m now getting some help. Sam has been given her own suite of offices and will be reporting to me. Gary and Jed, who had to be moved to accommodate her, are sharing Conference Room B. They sit at opposite ends of a huge table shouting at each other, like a ratty old couple arguing over who should pass the salt. Dave says it’s good for them.

Monday Massive double red alert!!! Lily Allen dedicated her song ‘F*** You!’ to Dave last night at the O2 arena!! How could she?? We offered her a peerage and a front-bench job as a Treasury minister in the Lords for goodness sake. Tom says it’s cos we took a principled stand against her foul-mouthed Broken Society lyrics. Now she’s directing her BS lyrics at us!! Oh dear, what will happen when Dave finds out??? He’s going to be cross and get red cheeks and then we’ll go down in the marginals even more. Can’t think about it now. Have to take Mr Vaizey his medication. Tom’s done a brilliant job padding the Austerity Room by stapling bubble-wrap to the walls.

Monday This is typical! I go away for some winter sun in the Canaries with Mummy and come back to find Labour on course to form the next government! One week I was out of the office — one week! — and it’s all gone pear-shaped, or tits up, as Jed is saying. It’s obviously Poppy’s fault, and Mr Grayling’s, double obviously. You can’t blame Dave. I would never have allowed that drowned-rat jogging picture ahead of his speech in Brighton. The British people will stand for many things, but a leader with rain dripping off his nose is not one of them. Ah well, it’s too late now. Better get stuck into putting things right.

Monday Helping Wonky Tom put finishing touches to our exciting plans for Tessa-Jowell-style-John-Lewis-style public services. (Possibly that’s too many hyphens. We may have to drop the Jowell bit. She won’t mind, she’s pleased as punch we’re using her idea.) It will be a revolution, handing Power To The People on a scale never before envisaged. Within months of a Tory victory millions of workers all over Britain will be sacking their bosses and awarding themselves huge pay rises!! Hooray!! It’s about time things stopped being so top-down in this country! Am off to unpack the new campaign literature.

Monday Hooray! Have been promoted. Am being given super-powerful new role heading up our Twitter Monitoring Unit! Obviously, because I am no longer able to do policy work, Wonky Tom will take over responsibility for all that boring stuff. So excited. Have a list of the most troublesome Tweeters, most of them called Nadine. There are about ten of her, all v convincing. The one where she blames the Speaker, the BBC and the Pentagon for colluding in an international conspiracy to vandalise her garden furniture is the most authentic. Only slightly disappointing thing is that Poppy has been made Chief Blog Monitor.

Monday Mr Maude is ecstatic. ‘A hung parliament! I told you so! People hate us!’ Dave v grumpy: ‘Speak for yourself.’ Quietly though, I think he is a bit worried that not as many people love him as unconditionally and totally as previously thought. It’s not the polls, exactly. It’s more to do with That Poster. There’s one in Brixton, for example, with a huge amount of mud mysteriously spattered all over it. Of course, it could easily have been a bus going through a puddle. But Dave is convinced it was hoodies. I think he could have put up with having mud slung at him by any other social group. But underprivileged youths from broken homes are just too much. Do they not know how much he understands them?

Monday A quick straw poll of the office confirms that only three of us would be clever enough to be a teacher under Dave’s new plans. This shows just how ambitious and brilliant they are! Wonky Tom would qualify, but says he would rather eat his own head than go near a roomful of screaming, obese delinquents with ADD (bit harsh). So basically, if you think about it, what we need is for thousands of very clever people who want a really horrible job that doesn’t pay much to come forward for the sake of their country’s future. Some sort of poster campaign might be in order, perhaps featuring a huge picture of our maths tsar Carole Vorderman warning kids to study hard or they’ll end up like her, with a stinky old third and only able to work on daytime TV quiz shows.

Monday V exciting! Now that we’ve decided to do married tax breaks for couples with children under five we’ll need an acronym. So we’re having a competition! I’ve come up with... the Married Couples With Children Under Five Allowance, or McWicufa. Pretty snappy huh! Everyone joining in the fun except for IDS who’s in a stinky mood and says if we’re going to limit his great innovation to couples with children we had better stipulate how many. He says only those with at least five children all aged under five should qualify. Something to do with God’s will and every sperm being sacred. Wasn’t that a song? I don’t know. He does go on sometimes.

Monday What a way to start The Year For Change! Am quite overwhelmed by the response to my slogan. Dave’s Big Face may be the most successful political poster campaign of all time. And to think how it started. With me walking into Nigel’s office in tears, practically hysterical. Little did I know when I wailed ‘We can’t go on like this!’ while blowing my nose into my cardy sleeve that my words would be up in lights. Of course we left off the rest of the sentence.

Tamzin Lightwater’s New Year resolutions Seal the Deal Goodness knows why, but the polls are still suggesting that a few strange voters are not yet 101 per cent sure they want Dave for PM. This sounds wacky, but we have to take it seriously and do everything we can to address that last tiny bit of doubt. As such we will be monitoring Dave’s parting 24/7 to make sure it doesn’t creep up into a quiff. Be Less Posh I’ve just spent five hours going through shadow Cabinet biographies on Wiki erasing public school references. Painstaking work but the sort of dedication that is going to be needed if we are to gain the British people’s trust.

Forty-five Decembers ago this magazine was edited by Iain Macleod MP, later chancellor. Macleod died in July 1970, a month after the Tories took office. His daughter Diana, up in town for the Red Cross’s Christmas fair, shows me a stash of her father’s papers she recently found. They include detailed documents preparing for the Heath government’s first budget, and a 1962 note from Macleod to the foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, advising him that young Diana had inadvertently admitted the Russian spy, Commander Ivanov, to her birthday party. Douglas-Home writes back: ‘As we have already had a word about this, I will put no more on paper.’ Diana has little memory of Ivanov but she does recall the night of her father’s death.

Monday Been agonising over it all weekend but I just don’t think I like the sound of Tammy Waters. I know it’s my best chance to get a safe seat, but Daddy is furious. Says it makes me sound like a country and western singer. Dave is adamant and says it really suits me. Am starting to wonder if all this shortening of posh names has gone a bit too far. Just because a candidate is called Richard Grosvenor-House-Plunkett-Ernie-Wise-Earl-Grey-Count-Dracula, or whatever poor Mr Drax’s original name was before we mangled it, doesn’t mean he can’t get down with the kids on sink estates. Take IDS, or Iain Smith, as he will soon be known.

Monday Oh dear. Maybe Mr Maude was right. Maybe we are heading for... no, I won’t say it. I refuse to say the HP words. A few rogue polls, that’s all it is. Dave says this would never have happened if we had got his No Complacency message out properly. We are now under orders to brief that ‘we take nothing for granted’ to at least 50 journalists a day. If we do not fulfil our anti-complacency briefing quotas, we face having our pay docked. Still, there’s some good news. The first official portrait of Dave has been unveiled to universal acclaim, making worthwhile all those hours we put into brainstorming whether or not he should wear a tie (obviously not!). However, we are not complacent.