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
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,
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
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
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
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’
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
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
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
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
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.
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 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,
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,
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
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
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
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.’
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
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?