Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 9 June 2006

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….’ I tried this out on Daddy this morning and he screamed, ‘That’s it, I’m voting Ukip!’ (Mind you, he always says this when his muesli has gone down the wrong way.) It would be nice to celebrate being in the magic forties, thanks to ‘Cam-buster’ — lovely Sun headline! — but we are not allowed to mention the polls.