Interview

We interview David Cameron for today's issue of The Spectator. Here's an extended version of that interview for CoffeeHousers: The most striking thing about David Cameron is how well rested he looks. You wouldn’t guess that he was the father of a ten-month-old baby, let alone Prime Minister. He has no bags under his eyes — unlike his staff. He also seems relaxed. He jovially beckons us in to his Downing Street office and then flops down into one of the two high-backed chairs and urges one of us to take the other: ‘the Chancellor’s chair’, he calls it, with a chuckle. The last time we interviewed him, during the general election campaign, he was a different man, tired and tetchy.

Diplomats are often seen as stuffy characters from a different century, men who often appear lost in today’s chaotic world. Nobody could be further from that caricature than Mark Sedwill, the former British ambassador in Kabul and outgoing NATO Senior Civilian Representative to Afghanistan. For more than a year, Sedwill has been, first, General Stanley McChrystal’s right-hand and, more recently, the civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus. Since he took up his ambassadorial post in Kabul, after a stint as Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan, few Britons have had as much influence on NATO’s strategy as him.

For once, I am in total agreement with Nigel Farage: the best way for Sally Bercow to help her husband is to take a vow of silence. Her recent Cleopatra act diverted attention from the persistent indignity of parliament’s relationship with IPSA, but it has done little to raise the diminutive Speaker’s diminutive reputation.   Flushed with embarrassment, Mrs Bercow spent most of Friday afternoon insisting that the Evening Standard had distorted her. She went into yummy mummy mode, confiding to Twitter that she was baking cakes for her son’s lunch box – nice rather than naughty.

Today's Guardian calls it his first interview since leaving office, although I think the Independent beat them to that one back in July. But, in any case, Gordon Brown's chat with Larry Elliot is another staging post on his slow path back to public life. Here's my quick summary: 1) Sniping from the moral high ground. A bit late now, but Brown is making a desperate scramble for the moral high ground. Not for him, he says, scurrilous memoirs that sift through the "arguments" of the past. No, he's got far more important things on his mind than muck-raking and innuendo, like the future of financial regulation across the world. Or has he? It's hard not to see barbs mixed in amongst it all. Take this line from the interview: "I am a full-time MP, not a businessman.