Diary

Off to the States for a fortnight’s book tour, trying to plug my A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Prepare yourself for a veritable carpet-bombing of name-dropping, on the basis that if you can’t boast shamelessly in the Speccie Diary, where on earth can you? The Chaos Club in New York radiates reactionary chic. Flanked by Tom Wolfe — complete in the high collar and three-piece white suit — and Norman Podhoretz, I set out my argument. Next stop a speech and dinner given by the wonderfully counter-counter-cultural magazine The New Criterion at the Cosmopolitan Club.

MONDAY I don’t know why everyone is getting so worked up about our lovely green taxes. If  they read the small print, they would see that what Gids takes away with one hand, he is quite literally going to give us back with the other. Every penny that he takes taxing your holiday flights (if you will insist on taking more than one!) will be paid back through our Non-Judgmental Family Tax Relief. Nobody will lose out. The Modern Families Tax Allowance will encompass anyone who can make a reasonable claim to be a ‘committed unit’. To give you an idea of how inclusive this will be ... let’s just say I’m satisfied that Sesame and I will be allowed to register. All I have to do is declare my intention to put her in foal. So, in short, a fuss about nothing.

MONDAY Off to New York with Dave and DD next week! Am working flat out on preps. First priority: which hotel? It’s the Four Seasons versus Soho House. While East 57th Street says ‘statesmen-in-waiting’, the Meatpacking District says ‘modern, vibrant and cool’. This is what Jed calls a Fork in the Road. Meetings set up with Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Tina Brown and Robert De Niro (subject to confirmation). No word yet from Hillary. Surely she will agree to a top-secret informal breakfast summit? Have just heard Poppy is coming too. Am  trying not to see this as undermining me but rather that we will be glamorous power pals, a bit like Sex and the City only with brains.

MONDAY I know I should be excited about the move to Millbank — historic landslide here we come! — but I’d just got my desk next to Jed’s office. It’s taken months of ‘edging’ at rate of one centimetre a day. Now I’ll have to start all over again. It’s sad to be leaving our traditional home above Starbucks. So much history, so many memories: the time I left a top-secret policy document on the counter, the hours spent queuing for caramel lattes. It’s the end of an era.... Dave and DD back from the East End looking v triumphant after their immigration crackdown. DD proclaimed: ‘The boy done well, he’s definitely getting the hang of it.

Monday OK, OK, I was wrong. (It does happen you know.) I may have been a teensy bit oversensitive about the whole ‘marriage’ thing. But I am now prepared to admit that it does seem that it may, after all, be the answer to everything. I cannot argue with statistics showing that hardly anybody on these south London housing estates is married. And everyone is getting shot. Contrast that with the situation in, let’s say, Witney, where 95 per cent of people are married. And gun crime is nonexistent. Also, as Jed explained to us at Strategy Hub, there are no end of political problems you can apply the marriage formula thingy to and with the added benefit that banging on and on about it buys off a huge chunk of the grassroots! How clever is that?

Monday Am fed up. It simply cannot be the case that everyone smoked cannabis at school. They’re clearly all just saying it to suck up to Dave. Head office unbearable. I’ve had it up to here with Moroccan black, red seal and ‘Maui wowie’. Well, I’m not going to lie. I have never smoked marijuana. There — I’ve said it! The taboo has been shattered. Found out this afternoon I don’t have clearance for Operation Mary Jane meetings but Poppy and Wonky Tom do. Stopped Jed outside Tranquillity Room and asked him straight out: ‘Is it because I’ve not smoked cannabis?’ Jed said: ‘No way, man, you’re cool with us, daddy-o. It’s just there aren’t enough chairs.’ Harrumph.

Monday What a morning! Was having coffee with Jed’s new PA, Janice. Lovely lady. V spiritual — although some might say a bit severe-looking with the shaved head. Anyway, as Nigel says, she’s ‘taken a shine to me’. She tells me things that are troubling her and today she told me something’s going on which she doesn’t think is ethical. It seems Dave has been getting coaching from ‘a senior Labour figure’. She made me swear a dozen different oaths — including one on Sesame’s forthcoming dressage trials — before she told me who it was. Suffice to say that when she told me the name I swallowed a piece of mini muffin down into my windpipe. It was dreadful. The whole of Starbucks was in panic.

SUNDAY Hideous day of torment fielding non-stop calls from rude reporters asking, ‘What’s Dave got against Catholics?’ and ‘Does he support gay rights, or what?’ (We should go ahead with Gids’s plan to put the press through to a call centre in Delhi at weekends.) Was only just coping when Nigel rang to ask how the holding line on gay adoption was holding up. I said the holding line wouldn’t hold much longer and he said, ‘Well, then, you’re going to have to tell them what Dave really feels about it.’ Protested that I hadn’t the faintest idea what Dave feels. Jed hasn’t decided yet. Long pause, then he said, ‘You’ll just have to make something up, have a guess....’ What was I supposed to do?

MONDAY The scariest thing was waiting for us in the meeting room this morning. It was a huge projected figure on the wall with the head of Shilpa Shetty and the body of Jade Goody. Jed marched in, stood in front of it and said, ‘Ideas?’ Everyone mute. Except Wonky Tom who can’t bear silences and stammered, ‘Is this about broadcasting regulations?’ But our beloved Director of Strategy said it was not — or words to that effect which I can’t use here. ‘This, my fellow change-makers, is today’s Conservative party. Beautiful head — shame about the fat, horrible, reactionary bit underneath it.’ Why didn’t he just ask us to come up with new ways of marketing the shadow Cabinet?

Monday Don’t ask me why, but suddenly the buzzword is ‘Thatcher’. Memo marked ‘Urgent’ says the T-word count for an average speech is now ten times minimum ‘until further notice’. Jed rushed into the office this morning all breathless and sweaty, and announced extra greenie points (frappuccino machine tokens, carbon offset holiday credits, soft loo-roll allowance!) for anyone who thinks up new and inventive ways of relating Dave’s policies to ‘the Leaderene’. All ideas must be fully reversible in case we want to ditch her later. Am going to give it a whirl.

Monday Who would have thought thrift could be so much fun! Am having a ball teaching working people to be careful with their money as part of our ‘Live Life For Less’ campaign. Obviously we can’t actually cut the cost of living or mess about with interest rates and inflation (we’re not going there again!) so the next best thing is to teach people to be a bit more responsible with the cash they have. Buy slightly smaller plasma TVs, one 4x4 per family, that sort of thing. Nigel suggested it would be more hard-hitting if we called it ‘Poor people — know your limits’, but Jed doesn’t want to upset our new working-class supporters by being too confrontational.