Diary

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.

Monday I can’t quite believe what we had a strategy meeting about this morning. My hands are trembling as I type... What if climate change doesn’t exist? It’s too awful to contemplate. But we are being asked to consider: what if the earth is not getting warmer? What if the world is not sleepwalking to ecological disaster?! What if... OMG... what if Lord Lawson is right!?!?!! Gary said we need a fallback position, in case there’s more of this stuff about scientists telling porkies. But Jed said to question our faith in climate change now would be heresy. The lack of proof, he says, is the whole point. ‘If the big guy with the beard came down from the sky and introduced himself it wouldn’t be faith, would it?

Monday Exciting trip to Norfolk for the ‘de-selection’. After a gruelling train journey east, Poppy and I tucked into a delicious spread in a heavenly tea shop with the biggest scones ever. Everything was so cheap! We bought two of everything in all the shops, and got some great deals on Haggarts Tweed. We then had to meet Sir Jeremy Bagge, Turnip Taleban commander, who demanded to know why ‘Central Office’ — I think he means CCHQ — had sent a couple of giggly schoolgirls to sort out the biggest challenge to Dave’s authority. What a cheek! We informed him that this was not the biggest challenge to Dave’s authority. That was when Mr Grieve nearly took a principled stand on grammar schools, but thankfully didn’t.

Not long ago, I astounded the men sitting next to me at a dinner party (yes, dinner parties still take place here and there) by saying that I thought Gordon Brown was handsome, and indeed had sex appeal. The men exclaimed that I had gone off my rocker. But the women within earshot immediately chipped in to support me. They agreed that the Prime Minister was an attractive man: he exuded an aura of manliness, of reticence, of depth of feeling, all qualities which are very attractive to women. There then followed one of those enjoyable conversations about who among our leading politicians did, and who did not, have sex appeal.

Many hands tore at the Berlin Wall. To a large extent it collapsed from its own weight, but we should acknowledge the shove given by European democrats, Pope John Paul II, the dissidents in the Soviet Union, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr and George Kennan, who defined the policies that contained communism without blowing up the world or in the name of freedom destroying freedom at home. And Gorbachev. I see him around a lot and regret that he never seems to get the acclaim he deserves for being willing to put his country before his party. Americans tend to give most of the credit to Ronald Reagan.

Monday Some v awkward people are deliberately misunderstanding what Dave said about women- only shortlists. We feel we must remind these people that troublemaking is fundamentally unConservative and that any further attempts to disrupt Compassionate Cameronian principles of compliance with the party line and non-resistance to the stated policy of the leadership will be met with the strongest possible measures. Just to be clear: when Dave said, ‘I want women-only shortlists’, he did not mean that we are going to bring in women-only shortlists. Duh!! What he meant — and I can’t believe we are having to spell this out — is that we may or may not have all-women shortlists at some point in the future, quite possibly by accident. Or not.

Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain next year is a true historical landmark, as it will be the first official visit of a reigning pontiff in history. Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain next year is a true historical landmark, as it will be the first official visit of a reigning pontiff in history. John Paul II’s visit in 1982 was a private one. Gordon Brown says he invited his Holiness, which — if true — would represent a gross breach of protocol. Only the Queen can invite a head of state to Britain. Baroness Thatcher also discussed the prospect of a visit when she met the Pope in Rome earlier this summer. But the real go-between was Francis Campbell, Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See, the first Catholic to be appointed to that post.

Monday Oh dear. What a sad day. Desperate calls from upset MPs to the Expenses Helpline. Many of them elderly and beside themselves with worry about how they are going to make the repayments. Some are even having to contemplate horrendous sacrifices such as selling paintings that have been in their family for centuries! Of course, we are giving them all the support we can, but Dave is adamant: pay up or stand down. (He’s so sexy when he does ultimatums!) And as Jed movingly pointed out at morning strategy meeting, every cloud has a silver lining.