Diary – 2 November 2002

Editing a newspaper is not a dinner party, as Chairman Mao would have observed had he been running a tabloid, but you sure do get invited to dinners and lunches and breakfasts, most of which are politely turned down because there is a paper to publish and competitors to clobber mercilessly and ceaselessly. But, thanks to the influence of the peerless political-reporting team at the Times, some invitations arrive which can’t be summarily rejected even if the reporters have to provide the verbal equivalent of subtitles by translating the lofty concepts or subtle intrigues being articulated by our hosts. So, it was clear on the eve of the Bournemouth conference during a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith that the next few days of speeches would mark a turning point for the Conservative party, even though it was obvious that he would lose his voice long before the delegates retreated from the seaside.