DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
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. Nigel spoils the morning meeting by humming the Dam Busters theme and declaring, ‘The champagne is on ice!’ Mr Maude, hair on end again, growls: ‘O brilliant, yes! Why don’t we all just sit down and spend the next three years watching the ice melt then!? Hmmm? Any takers for sitting down?’ He is turning into Basil Fawlty. With the Grim Reaper’s scythe.
TUESDAY IDS phones in from the country (‘Hullo!’) to ask when we are putting out the press release on his Poverty and Social Breakdown sub-group report. Some trouble getting past switchboard, who did not know who he was. He wants to know if we can bike him a copy because his email is down, the ‘facsimile machine’ is broken and he has to wait in all day while the gamekeeper sorts out the bottom fence. He would send Mrs Dawson down to the village to get help but the Morgan is playing up again. Sounds like he’s having a tough time. I arrange a bike. It’s only a couple of hundred pounds and it’s a very important report. You can’t skimp when it’s all about helping poor people, can you?
WEDNESDAY
A lot of mail demanding ‘Equal Rights For AListers’. Poor Adam Rickitt had to give an interview from his hide-out appealing for calm. No wonder none of them have applied for seats. They can’t leave their homes. Bernard and Anne have three of them staying in their spare room. Dave desperate to find more willing victims and we all have to think of ten people we know who are either ‘women, ethnic or disabled’. Mummy suggests Mrs Cumberbatch’s daughter Aileen from Little Itchington. ‘She’s one of those lesbians. She’s got shaved hair and everything.’ I explain as gently as I can that only lipstick lesbians need apply. ‘Well, can’t you pretend to be one, darling, if it will get you a safe seat? Your father and I would be so proud.’ Hmmm.
THURSDAY Julian in terrible flap because he needs a hernia op and wants to go private. ‘Do we have to abandon our traditional hostility to public services now, or is it just an aspiration?’ Couldn’t care less as have much worse drama. My tabloid paramour informs me he doesn’t envisage me as marriage material. I can’t believe it. I may have to become an A-lister after all....
tamzin.lightwater@spectator.co.uk
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