Tamzin Lightwater

MondayI love August! So exciting. Dave is in totally secret location in Corfu. Only Jed and an agency snapper know the details. This is part of brilliant ‘deflection’ strategy. If anything goes wrong, e.g., shad. cab. split on Middle East erupts, we roll out pics of Dave in O’Neill surf shorts. Genius! If row really bad — e.g., Foxy manages to work out we’ve put a bar on his mobile phone to stop him calling journalists — we have pics of Dave with trunks slightly falling down. I hope it won’t come to that. Poor Dave, the things he does for the Cause. Even though he’s by a pool with his mates from ‘Bully’ — not sure what this means, can’t be about darts surely? — he conducts big conference call on Lebanon.

MONDAYHave learnt important lesson: Never meet your heroes, or, in the case of former prime ministers from Brixton, don’t even speak to them on phone. Had to call for quote on Lottery proposals. Norma answered. Lot of sighing. Then clunking as phone dropped and long silence before a voice said, ‘Sir John Major KG here, hello, yes.’ I explained that I just needed two sentences. He said, ‘This will necessarily take a not inconsiderable period to organise. In my judgment, you should remain at the end of the telephone during what I hope will be a reasonably brief interlude.’ Cue muffled sound of things being dropped, paper crackling, pens that didn’t work furiously scratching on notepads.

MONDAYDave, give me strength! If I get one more phone call from Foxy asking me to write press releases about his trip to Afghanistan, I’m going to make an official complaint. Thought DC looked v. handsome in his war casuals (Howies recycled polo shirt v. dashing). But Jed says we’ve been let down by sweat control. He’s been screaming at Nigel all day. (‘If I see one more bead someone is getting transferred to Ashcroft’s marginals team faster than they can say “general well being”!’) It’s a difficult time. Everyone nervous about ambitious Mr Fox being so close to Dear Leader with all those guns and explosives about. Dave’s ideas are not taking Helmand by storm either.

MondayVery odd thing has happened. Was in Starbucks queuing for brownies when gorgeous Alessio fixed me with his sultry stare and said, ‘Hey, lady, you leave your things!’ And produced my folder of emails! He said it fell off the counter, and he’s sorry it’s soggy but it landed in a puddle of semi-skimmed. So I didn’t leak the emails after all! Am so disappointed. Was enjoying being femme fatale and having everyone treading on eggshells. Tuesday Another Tory belief successfully ditched! Rail privatisation goes the way of patient passports, tax cuts, leaving the EPP and fighting crime. (‘To the great resting place of principles in the sky,’ Nigel says.) Dave is ripping through them!

MONDAY Leaked email trails — 1 (v bad); imploring phonecalls to Dave’s office pretending will have nervous breakdown if sacked — 15 (seems to have worked!); hooded tops delivered to office — 135 (think we’ve struck a chord. Plus some of them are really smart. Am wearing one now, as a matter of fact. It says ‘enta da getto’. Think it’s Italian). Best news is I found the separate bundle of Dave’s responses and burned them in ritualistic anti-leaking ceremony. So no one will ever know what he said about Theresa and Mr Maude (which is just as well because it doesn’t have much to do with our new doctrine of loving everyone). Considering I nearly brought party to its knees, everyone being v nice to me.

MondayI hate it when people start talking in acronyms. It always means trouble. The inquest into the Chiz and Bromley by-election is called ‘BBI’. The official line is we haven’t yet achieved full ‘brand penetration’ — or ‘BP’ — which, according to Jed, will only come when we get lift-off with our ‘Cameron Localisation Strategy’ or ‘CLS’. Nigel says this is nonsense. What we’re looking at is a ‘TFU’ (total you-know-what). After seeing little Bob Neill (‘our newest MP!’) at the away day, I’m inclined to agree. He’s almost invisible to the naked eye. When Poppy and I arrived he was talking to Alan Duncan, who was craning his neck downwards.

MONDAYMr Maude stormed out of his Still A Very Long Way To Go Sub-Group meeting this morning. Normally, he is the only one who enjoys these but Nigel says that JRI (as the ‘Jonathan Ross Inquest’ must be referred to round the office) is really pushing him to the edge. Confused: the briefing on Saturday was that Dave’s appearance on — well, on that TV show — had been a triumph. Mr Letwin said that, in his judgment, the interview had ‘exuded perhaps the most tempting, appealing and altogether succulent aroma of any Cameron televisual appearance to date’. (Mr Letwin talks about ‘aromas’ a lot these days: Poppy says he needs some aromatherapy).

MondayAm contemplating a serious hissy fit. On phone this morning briefing Dave’s family speech, dutifully telling a v. rude journalist that ‘this is all about traditional Tory values’, when suddenly I hear Poppy on the other line, in full mockney accent, saying: ‘Yeah, that’s right, this spells the end of traditional Tory values.’ This is outrageous! Why is it me who gets lumped with the boring ‘core’ briefing whilst Poppy gets to spin the opposite line about tax breaks for gays?! Is it because she wears drainpipe jeans to the office? I can be daring and street too, actually. Beneath this perfect blow-dry there’s a liberal slacker just fighting to get out. I want a piece of the modernising action!

Hot: where’s the glacier when you need it? MONDAY Hot: where’s the glacier when you need it? Am sick of trawling internet for violent lyrics Dave can use for campaign against rap: just because someone called ‘Lethal Bizzle’ said he was a ‘donut’ — I don’t even understand why this is an insult. Various references to cracking skulls, shooting up and hanging with crews — or should I say ‘crewz’? Found repeated use of ‘their’ instead of ‘there’, possessive its with an apostrophe etc. Honeztly, Dave should launch a campaign against bad spelling in hip-hop if you ask me. Thankfully, we are moving on soon. Our next campaign is an attack on novelty mobile ringtones. ‘Cameron takes on Crazy Frog.

Monday Exhausted. Have ploughed through nearly 30 pages (a record for me) of our 500-page briefing on Gideon’s speech and I’m still no wiser. Are we going to cut taxes or not? Call me a ‘Thatcherite’ (banned word in the new pocket Book of Dave for all staff), but shouldn’t we be a bit clearer about this stuff now that we are going to be in power? Sherwood, our in-house creative-thinking specialist, has come up with a handy way to remember it: we’ve gone from flat tax to flatter taxes to our position now, which is gently reclining taxes, he says. ‘We have swapped a horrid lumpy settee of a tax policy for a smooth, dusty-pink chaise longue....

MONDAY Apparently the interviews for the A-list of candidates were horrendous. Three of Poppy’s friends, Bunty, Polly and Suzie, went before the panel and said it was like Pop Idol. Bernard Jenkin sitting there with his arms folded like Simon Cowell, Shireen Ritchie all smiles and hugs like Sharon Osbourne.Mr Flight had the worst time. Bernard barked, ‘Well, what do you do?’ ‘Er, I used to be an MP.’ ‘No no. What do you do? Can you sing, can you dance, are you offering to be sawn in half?’ So Mr Flight — O the horror of it — sang ‘I Am What I Am’. Total silence. Mind you, it got him on the list, didn’t it? TUESDAYAs part of internal greening measures, have persuaded parents to buy me a new car.

Poppy says if you put your ear to the ground it sounds very much like a thousand people quietly screaming, ‘Gordon is coming!’ All the talk is of ‘timetables’ and ‘transitions’. MondayPoppy says if you put your ear to the ground it sounds very much like a thousand people quietly screaming, ‘Gordon is coming!’ All the talk is of ‘timetables’ and ‘transitions’. Hezza has been on the phone saying it takes him back to ‘the glory days of ’90, yes indeed, mmmm’. Poppy says Dave will have to change too or Gordon will rip ‘his head straight off’. She says with glassy eyes that only DD has the stamina to withstand the onslaught of old-fashioned political violence that is about to be unleashed.

The government is in ‘meltdown’ THURSDAY The government is in ‘meltdown’ and we are marking the occasion with lots of glacier jokes (Steve not amused) and by gazing at our collective navel. Much argument about who should ‘be in the lead’, and whether letting prisoners out is worse than sleeping with your secretary. Or, indeed, sleeping with prisoners. Still, at least one good thing has come from the ‘lags and shags’ debacle, as Nigel likes to call it: Poppy is ecstatic. DD is finally ringing her in the middle of the night. Thank heavens. It was becoming painful to listen to her whining on about the lack of intrusive phone calls demanding obscure crime statistics, ‘Well, he did with all his other researchers’ etc.

SUNDAY NIGHTDave’s private office has just rung to say he wants me to accompany him on his earth-saving trip to Norway to highlight global warming — am so excited my climate’s changing! (Memo to self — restrain rubbish humour, must be picking it up from poor Mr Letwin.) V. select group. DC, Chief of Staff, Environment Spokesman and me — not so shabby being on the ‘gumby’ Defra brief now, eh Poppy?! Best thing is we’re travelling there on luxury private plane. MONDAYMentioned trip 17 times this morning. Made me popular for a bit but think may now be losing friends. The other press officers are clearly trying to ruin it.

Monday A strange post-Manchester memo has arrived with a list of approved adjectives. I don’t know what was wrong with all the old adjectives but apparently we have to use new ones — ‘new’ is one of them, in fact. Poppy claims that ‘new’ is, in fact, old, which confuses me somewhat. There are two pages of ‘words you may like to include when writing press releases and speeches for members of the front bench in future’. I know what ‘you may like to’ means around here, and it isn’t optional. Hey — I sound quite seasoned. Anyway the words are all stupid. I don’t know how I’m going to get them into my statement on bird flu.

MONDAY Another day, another chance to demonstrate our values. We are launching our spring forum in Manchester with an initiative: ‘focusing on the transformational impact of trusting people’. DD was meant to be in charge but Dave stepped in at the last minute and said he would do it himself because D2 was bound to muck it up. Poppy in fearful snit after being put in charge of Wives’ Product Placement: Smythson’s handbags, novels written by spouses of members of the shadow Cabinet, etc. Says it’s beneath her. Well, excuse me! For once I seem to have come out on top. Am on a secret unit helping to secure celebrity endorsements.

MONDAYOrders from Dave. We must seize back the agenda, get everyone off sleaze. Problem is, DD wants to get stuck in and keeps ringing to set us on to some new loans-for-honours research project. Nigel says we must say, ‘Yes, right away, Mr Davis’ — and then get on with what we were doing. Dave says the Tories have changed. The days of bare-faced hypocrisy are over. Nowadays, if we are sitting in a bloody big glass house we don’t throw stones around — OK? It doesn’t seem fair. The Tories were the natural party of sleaze and now Labour has even taken that away from us. TUESDAYBig kerfuffle in reception. Nigel called security. But it was only Sir Bob coming in for his meeting with Dave. There was a lot of shouting as usual.

MONDAYPanic and frenzy. Nigel is calling it Dave v. Goliath. Sebastian says if the first draft of Dave’s budget response is anything to go by it will be more like the ‘Ramble in the Jungle’. Focus group findings pinned to every wall — ‘If Dave was an alcopop, which flavour would he be?’ ‘Er, chocolate.’ The flatscreen playing a constant loop of Bush v. Clinton debates for inspiration. Every few minutes Nigel walks past whooping. He is wearing a Yankees cap. He asked me to get him a cup of coffee and shouted: ‘Go, go, go!’ This must be what Dave meant when he urged us to look within ourselves and find a renewed energy and vigour. PMNigel has set up a Budget Day ‘holistic sub unit’ run by yours truly!

Monday Jed has reassured us that he will still be working full-time for Dave once he moves to America. All those silly people claiming his physical whereabouts makes a difference to The Project are hysterical. There is no reason why he cannot run the Conservative party from his new home in California. This is a modern, family-friendly working practice in action. Indeed we hope the move will inspire hard-working Britons everywhere to relocate to sunnier climes and demand their employers keep pace with their changing lifestyle by continuing to pay them their full salary. Of course Gary will have to take on those duties which require an actual physical presence at HQ. He was in a v jolly mood, until we took him the file marked ‘cappuccino machine instructions’.

Monday Not happy. In fact I would say my GWB is at a record low. Among the deeply troubling unanswered questions I am wrestling with: Why was I not informed about Mr Simpson’s holiday reading list? Who authorised it? And what’s going to happen to the proper reading list I was tasked with drawing up? The silly nonsense Biggles put on his list is just pointless, a load of boring old history books. Nigel is being v sweet about it and says we might leak my list to the press separately, since it’s a feast of populist headline-grabbing stuff like Jordan’s Perfect Ponies and Who Moved My Cheese?, the cutting-edge self-development book that no self-respecting Conservative change-maker should be without as he relaxes on his friend’s yacht in Porto Cervo this August.