The Spectator’s Notes | 21 October 2006

These notes are being written on 17 October, the day when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the least satisfactory of the lot. Ex-ministers rush out their diaries (and memoirs) in the brief period when people can remember who they are and the colleagues they dislike are still in office. The authors play a double game — encouraging the publishers and television companies to pay big money with promises of revelations, and then suddenly getting pompous about confidentiality when it starts to look too awkward for them. Of the Ecclestone affair in Tony Blair’s first year in office, David Blunkett writes, ‘I’m not putting a lot down here in my diary’, which suggests he was already planning publication, and already editing with that in mind.