Diary

Monday DD is on a major ‘guns ’n’ ammo’ high. It was manageable while it was just General Dannatt stuff, but now it’s spread — badly. No one could make sense of his rant about veiled Muslims being the ‘unexploded bombs of modern politics’ until Poppy pointed out that he was, for about three hours, in the bomb disposal unit of the territorial SAS. A quick phonecall to Doreen confirmed that he spent the weekend creeping up on mysterious packages in the back garden. Found it strangely unsettling when he approached me after morning conference and said, ‘Y’know, Tammy, sometimes the best way to avoid a big explosion is to have a series of smaller detonations.’ But then when I thought about it, I realised it made a lot of sense.

Monday night Am in spare room at Dave and Sam’s! On ‘webcameron’ duty which means I have to follow leader everywhere, and help with that internet thingy he does. There’s a huge team of people here, fussing about. As Jed says, spontaneity doesn’t come out of thin air you know! Did my first shoot today — ‘Dave makes granola-based breakfast while discussing health policy.’ Things got tricky when the false wall the builders put up down the middle of the kitchen to make it look pok-ier started flapping around like an old Crossroads set. Looked like we might have to abandon filming until I came up with a fab idea which everyone agreed would totally dumb things down.

SATURDAY Phonecalls to Dorset police: 235. Nights without sleep: 3. Double espressos: 25. Where is Dave’s pass?!!?!? We applied two months ago for-heaven’s-to-Betsy-Duncan-Smith’s-sake. Chief constable most unhelpful. ‘How do we know your so-called Mr Cameron’s not an al-Qa’eda sleeper cell, eh? Eh?’ Why would they do this? Am starting to feel nervous. I mean, how well do we really know Dave? Nigel says this is the caffeine talking. But, seriously, you can’t be too careful, can you?   SUNDAY It’s here! DD rang the chief constable and threatened to ‘give him an interview without biscuits’ (?). Now it’s just 3,000 other members of the party, including yours truly, who have to queue.

I have always been a confident person. Whether setting up my own business, pitching a new idea or appearing on TV, I have always thought that I am perfectly capable of holding my own. But speaking at a party conference? It never even crossed my mind that I would go to one, let alone organise my own fringe meeting. So I must admit that, as the conference season kicked off, I had a moment of self-doubt. Since launching OUR SAY (a new campaign pushing for the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums) I have been hugely encouraged by the positive feedback, even from those who do not entirely agree with our proposals.

Monday Look, this thing with the tree isn’t funny. It’s deadly serious. Jed has found out from the ad agency where they got the template and it’s not good news. Terrible showdown with little guy in red specs who looked just like Lord Saatchi’s mini-me. Personally I don’t see it makes much difference that our new logo is based on the first flag of Lebanon. Or that it’s a cedar, not an oak. We have cedars in Britain don’t we? But Jed is distraught and says that when Dave finds out ‘we’re all kofta’ — some form of cockney rhyming slang. Don’t care. Am off to Bournemouth with Jed for conference preps while everyone else going to horrid shad cab away-day in Leeds. Feel v smug.

Monday Busy busy. Dave is adamant that foreign policy cannot be reduced to soundbites, so of course, as Jed explained, we need a range of soundbites to convey this. ‘We will give solid not slavish support to the US’; ‘We will not come up with grand schemes to remake the world’ (Nigel says this is just as well because we can’t think of any); and most important ‘We’re all neo-libs now’. Unfortunately, we’re short-staffed due to holidays in Corfu (we should set up an office there) so I end up doing both sides of the briefing. The notes were like a market research questionnaire. ‘If reporter neocon omit par. 5’, etc. Don’t know how we get away with it. Do these journos not speak to each other?

When I told my husband I had been asked to write the Spectator diary by the editor he retorted, ‘Nepotism.’ ‘No darling,’ I explained, ‘not Boris’ (whose brother Joe is married to my husband’s niece) ‘the new editor of The Spectator.’ ‘Ummm,’ he said, ‘so how do you want to come across in the diary?’ ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, ‘witty, clever, charming, likeable.’ ‘Ah’, he said, ‘better get someone else to write it, then.’ Of course, Matthew has every right to feel a little grumpy at the moment.

Chelsea Post Office, situated on the corner of Sloane Square, is a regular meeting place for us pensioners as we draw our weekly pension, in cash. Sometimes the queue sneaks down the King’s Road, but the long wait gives us the opportunity to catch up on local gossip and concerns. The ‘persons’ behind the grille are helpful and courteous, and we all know each other well. The government wants us to transfer our custom to Barclays, but if we had a problem it would involve an endless frustrating wait until ‘customer services’ respond from Bangalore or some equally puzzling conurbation. There is always some incident in the queue to keep us entertained. Last week a delightful pensioner colleague bypassed the queue to weigh an envelope.

I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and committed the huge crew was, even the riggers dolled up in jackets and ties. The new chairman gave me a cigar — two cigars.

I was once naive enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked Eastbourne, and he replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it. The same was true of Heywood Hill, the Bookshop for the Quality. He owned that too, and was generous enough to endow a special prize, presented each year during a jolly garden party at Chatsworth, to a writer not just for one book but for a lifetime’s achievement. This year the prize goes to Dame Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl’s achievements are so many that she really deserves ten prizes, but this will do very nicely to be going on with. Like almost all really good prose writers in our language, she is primarily a comic creator.

I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in their one-way systems and in the architecture of their civic and municipal buildings. By contrast, some of the English town centres seem to have been structured by saboteurs bent on uglifying them. One regularly finds a 21st-century monstrosity built out of giant glass eggshells sitting next to a classic 16th-century steepled church, which is in turn adjacent to a concrete bunker.

Cannes A year ago this week I tried to sell my idea for a blockbuster movie to Sam Goldwyn Junior. It was 12 noon, at the Majestic Hotel. I picked up my briefcase and strode past the upturned packet of Paprika Pringles on the floor. You don’t mess around before this sort of meeting. You prepare — numbers, market share, audience demographics. ‘Tell me,’ opened the mogul, ‘about your film.’ Without hype, but without understatement I laid it out. ‘Eating & Weeping is a Hollywood classic,’ I told him. ‘It is the mainstream, genre movie of Stanko the Bulgarian pastry chef, who accidentally causes the collapse of capitalism.’ Goldwyn looked blank so I pressed on.

Having once reviewed TV for a living, I obviously never watch the damn thing at all these days if I can help it. But like many males of my age and temperament, I was engrossed late last year by a series called Grumpy Old Men, in which celebrities railed in a futile but well-paid manner against some of the iniquities of the modern world. Some of these men were funny, others were just furious, while a few had obviously been chosen because they were celebrities, and not because they had anything of the slightest interest to say. But never mind. The extraordinary impact of this programme confirmed my own long-held conviction that rage is the emotion of the day. Love is all around, said Richard Curtis in his film Love, Actually. But how did most people respond to this message?

My granddaughter was christened at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of his birth — ‘I came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages’ — I was a little put out that Holly’s reception into the Church was not accompanied by some celestial commotion. Other than that, the only bleak thing about the service was that it forced me yet again to confront my own perfidy: over the years, and with barely a thought, I have broken most of the baptismal vows I have made as a parent and godparent.

Washington Not since Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership has any book of political reportage caused as much of a stir on either side of the Atlantic as Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller Plan of Attack. In the last few days I have listened to detailed dissections of the gospel according to Woodward. I have discussed his book in the West Wing of the White House, at student seminars at Georgetown University, during dinner with my fellow columnists of the American Spectator and at the hospitable home of its editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. I even had a conversation about Woodward in a place where his fierce anti-war opponents would no doubt like to see President George W. Bush — a high-security Texas prison.