Monday So exciting! Our lovely Cadbury bluey-purple manifesto is finally ready. The toll it has taken on Mr Letwin is horrific but Jed says a few months in the Austerity Room and he should be back to ‘normal’. (Our head of strategy’s finger quotation marks, not mine.) Mr Willetts jumping up and down with excitement
Monday Am in maternity department of Uniqlo stocking up on affordable, down-to-earth clothes for Sam to wear as she reaches out to ordinary mums during her campaign. Luckily the managers didn’t mind barring ordinary customers from the shop so they could give me a private viewing. Am honoured to be Sam’s press officer and making
Monday V dynamic strategy meeting. The challenge is clear: we must look more statesmanlike, whilst wearing Marlon Brando-style leather jackets. Jed is calling it ‘biker statesman chic’. He says Google executives have been doing it for years, there’s nothing to it. We must also find Dave some more budget accessories to wear following excellent coverage
Monday Rejoice! Rejoice! That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. I don’t want to gloat, I don’t want to make any obvious points like ‘Gordon, you’re so screwed,’ because that would be in poor taste. V moving moment when Dave came into the office this morning and we all chanted ‘Da-vid Da-vid!’ and
Monday Thank goodness! The Great Wobble of 2010 is over!! Never again will I go to Lanzarote so close to an election. Turns out, there wasn’t a single person doing strategy in my absence. Jed was doing brand detox and message aromatherapy, Gary was doing shouting at the press and Mr Letwin was doing sitting
Monday Massive double red alert!!! Lily Allen dedicated her song ‘F*** You!’ to Dave last night at the O2 arena!! How could she?? We offered her a peerage and a front-bench job as a Treasury minister in the Lords for goodness sake. Tom says it’s cos we took a principled stand against her foul-mouthed Broken
Monday This is typical! I go away for some winter sun in the Canaries with Mummy and come back to find Labour on course to form the next government! One week I was out of the office — one week! — and it’s all gone pear-shaped, or tits up, as Jed is saying. It’s obviously
Monday Helping Wonky Tom put finishing touches to our exciting plans for Tessa-Jowell-style-John-Lewis-style public services. (Possibly that’s too many hyphens. We may have to drop the Jowell bit. She won’t mind, she’s pleased as punch we’re using her idea.) It will be a revolution, handing Power To The People on a scale never before envisaged.
Monday Hooray! Have been promoted. Am being given super-powerful new role heading up our Twitter Monitoring Unit! Obviously, because I am no longer able to do policy work, Wonky Tom will take over responsibility for all that boring stuff. So excited. Have a list of the most troublesome Tweeters, most of them called Nadine. There
Monday Mr Maude is ecstatic. ‘A hung parliament! I told you so! People hate us!’ Dave v grumpy: ‘Speak for yourself.’ Quietly though, I think he is a bit worried that not as many people love him as unconditionally and totally as previously thought. It’s not the polls, exactly. It’s more to do with That
Monday A quick straw poll of the office confirms that only three of us would be clever enough to be a teacher under Dave’s new plans. This shows just how ambitious and brilliant they are! Wonky Tom would qualify, but says he would rather eat his own head than go near a roomful of screaming,
Monday V exciting! Now that we’ve decided to do married tax breaks for couples with children under five we’ll need an acronym. So we’re having a competition! I’ve come up with… the Married Couples With Children Under Five Allowance, or McWicufa. Pretty snappy huh! Everyone joining in the fun except for IDS who’s in a
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
Monday What a way to start The Year For Change! Am quite overwhelmed by the response to my slogan. Dave’s Big Face may be the most successful political poster campaign of all time. And to think how it started. With me walking into Nigel’s office in tears, practically hysterical. Little did I know when I
I’m going to be a big TV star. Big, big, big. Well, maybe not. As the saying goes in the movie world, every film is a great success until it’s released. My peak-time ITV1 show Michael Winner’s Dining Stars, one hour of me (could anything be better?), is currently much loved by those aware of
Tamzin Lightwater’s New Year resolutions Seal the Deal Goodness knows why, but the polls are still suggesting that a few strange voters are not yet 101 per cent sure they want Dave for PM. This sounds wacky, but we have to take it seriously and do everything we can to address that last tiny bit
There was something about the spectacle of the Queen grimly, and Tony Blair cheerfully, holding hands as they sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the Millennium Dome at the end of 1999 that could have alerted us that the decade ahead would not be a good one. Who could then have imagined that the United States,
Forty-five Decembers ago this magazine was edited by Iain Macleod MP, later chancellor. Macleod died in July 1970, a month after the Tories took office. His daughter Diana, up in town for the Red Cross’s Christmas fair, shows me a stash of her father’s papers she recently found. They include detailed documents preparing for the
Monday Been agonising over it all weekend but I just don’t think I like the sound of Tammy Waters. I know it’s my best chance to get a safe seat, but Daddy is furious. Says it makes me sound like a country and western singer. Dave is adamant and says it really suits me. Am
Monday Oh dear. Maybe Mr Maude was right. Maybe we are heading for… no, I won’t say it. I refuse to say the HP words. A few rogue polls, that’s all it is. Dave says this would never have happened if we had got his No Complacency message out properly. We are now under orders