Dylan Jones

A side effect of last week’s failed putsch is Peter Mandelson resuming his position at the front end of Gordon Brown’s election pantomime horse — pushing Harriet Harman into the rear. This is not good news for the Tories, as Harman would undoubtedly have alienated even more floating voters. I sat between her and Boris Johnson at a lunch recently, and what hard work it was. The Mayor was the guest speaker, but (naturally) arrived late and completely unprepared. He spent 20 minutes frantically scribbling on a piece of paper, talking to no one. I had no choice but to speak to the person on my left, the aforementioned Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House and Minister for Women & Equality.

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes. Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention on the early evening news (bumping Prince Charles’s 60th birthday celebrations into second place, I kid you not).

There are many things I’ll miss about my year with David Cameron, not least my regular visits to Portcullis House, the ugly upside-down cow’s udder opposite the Commons (it was designed by Michael Hopkins, although it looks as though he did this in the dark, possibly using Plasticine and some peat briquettes). After a while I began to think of its lobby as a current affairs version of the bar in Star Wars, the one peopled by a galaxy of freaks. It is also something of a research assistant catwalk, and while you couldn’t reasonably compare it to the lobby of Vogue House — which, predictably, has the most glamorous front of house in London — there are enough Tamzins, Tabithas and Tamaras here to put a spring in your John Lobbs.

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope, woke up with Philip Roth, had an affair with Tom Bower’s Conrad Black biography (principally because I felt I had to) and spent several days by the pool in Banyuls as the cicadas blithely scratched away in the olive trees with Rupert Everett. I even spent an afternoon with James Patterson just to see what all the fuss is about. But what mostly captured my attention was castration.

It’s been a busy week. There was Charles Finch’s dinner for Cate Blanchett at Drones (Jack Nicholson as louche as ever; Juliette Lewis surprisingly normal); a Calvin Klein dinner at Locanda Locatelli, the YSL Serpentine party and the BSME party at the Ritz. Everyone has Cameron Tourette’s these days, and you can’t go anywhere without being bombarded with opinions about the Vigorous Young Leader. Having done more fieldwork than is strictly necessary, I’d say that six out of ten people I meet want to vote for him, with, on the one hand, people like Links chairman John Ayton saying, ‘His world is bigger than politics’, and those on the other wondering where all the policies went.

Unlike Randy Newman, I’ve always loved LA in a completely unironic way. I love the climate, the light, the vegetation, the fake breasts, the lot. And the celebrity culture is impossible to get used to: I still get a childish thrill when I pull up to the lights and find myself next to Tom Cruise or Samuel L. Jackson. It’s fun. Puts a spring in your step (if you can have one in a rented Range Rover). We had an Aren’t We Clever To Be Here celebration there a few weeks ago, a party in the penthouse at the infamous Chateau Marmont, and most of the guests (gilt-edged parentheses for Elton John, Daniel Craig, David Furnish, Sam Taylor-Wood, Bret Easton Ellis and the cast of Desperate Housewives) had some sort of irreducible essence.

I am invited to the Oxford Union to speak in the last debate of the term. I had originally been invited to speak on the death of feminism earlier in the year, but as I couldn't go they kindly invited me back. The motion is less onerous – 'Life is too short to drink cheap wine' – and I am speaking for, along with Peter Stringfellow, among others. I have been preparing for weeks, soliciting everyone I meet for jokes and anecdotes, and obsessively honing my speech. Two days before I'm due to speak I make the mistake of running the final draft past three of my friends at dinner. They think it's so bad that they tell me they're going to send a hearse down to Oxford to pick me up afterwards.