DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
MONDAY I can’t believe people are saying that tax cutting is Gordon’s idea! This is an unbelievable cheek!! Dave has been banging on about cutting taxes for three years now. Every time he makes a speech it’s tax cuts this, tax cuts that. Tax, tax, tax — it’s all we ever talk about. You know what I think has gone wrong? We’ve been calling for tax cuts for so long now people just don’t hear us any more. It’s like white noise. This is probably why a lot of our tax cutting talk just hasn’t been reported. People are bored of it. I mean, there’s only so long you can go on about the Virtuous Cycle before people switch off. Even Mr Redwood was begging us to stop going on about it. Nanu! Nanu! Incidentally, I’ve had a lot of people asking me how Dave is going to honour his commitment not to promise up-front tax cuts. Let me make it clear once and for all — Dave never said ‘no up-front tax cuts’. What he said was ‘no up-front tax cuts yet’. Our plan was always to wait and unveil them during the recession when people were desperate. Which is the responsible thing to do.
TUESDAY Hooray! The super radical right-wing measures we’ve been secretly drawing up for years, while pretending we were only interested in silly things like huskies, is giving Gordo a real run for his money. He can promise to help Middle Britain all he wants but only the Compassionate Conservatives are promising to do something so fiendishly clever with National Insurance people can’t even begin to understand it! And for those still weirdly insisting we were against tax cuts before we’ve drawn up a brilliant and sophisticated briefing document: ‘Why Tories were first to promise tax cuts, and not Nick Clegg who is just making it up as he goes along.’ It explains how we’ve been secretly briefing these plans for months now. The fact that no journalist chose to write the story shows what a terrible liberal intelligentsia media bias we are up against. Maybe next time a top female Tory official hints that we’re thinking of doing something at some point but we haven’t quite decided what yet, the press will actually do their job and splash this dynamite across the front pages.
WEDNESDAY How predictable. Bev from Labour rings up to be childish. ‘Call that a tax cut? That’s a pathetic excuse for a tax cut.’ I was quick as lightning. ‘It may be a small tax cut but it’s our tax cut. And it’s funded.’ ‘Funded! Ha! Who promises funded tax cuts these days? Funded is so Nineties. You want to get into borrowing, mate. Still not read Keynes?’ I hate it when she calls me mate. Makes me feel a bit gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that. And no, I have not read Keynes. I tried to order it on Amazon but I ended up with a book called Rachel’s Holiday which looks like chick-lit to me. If this is what Labour is basing its recovery plan for Britain on, then I fear for this country, I really do. Am off to the King’s Road to try and find a red dress like Michelle Obama’s.
THURSDAY Memo from Jed in California complaining about the polls: ‘We need to dig out some new old ideas. Go through your files. There must be tons of stuff we’ve hinted at and then gone back on which we could now say that we are going to do after all. I want three old ideas from each of you by afternoon smoothie break, my time.’ Had a look in my computer for all those old tax-cutting ideas but couldn’t find them. Obviously I didn’t save them properly.
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