DIARY
JANE MOORE Christmas is coming. In fact, clock the mince pies on sale in M&S or the ruddy selection boxes in just about every store except Millets, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's here already. Last week saw the annual headache that is the publication of the top ten list of 'must-have' Christmas toys, all likely to be requested by those short people that live in your house and all guaranteed to be out of stock by 30 October because of a failure by manufacturers to pre-empt demand. Apparently, this year's Tracey Island is an equally hard-tocome-by Igglepiggle, a cuddly toy described as 'energetic but vulnerable'. I know how it feels. Last year, I thought I'd sussed it, locking myself away for the afternoon with just a laptop and a pile of those gift mags you throw in the bin the other 364 days of the year. Boy was I smug. No queue scrums for me, just the relatively effortless task of answering my door to a stream of polite and punctual couriers bearing gifts. The reality, of course, was that one internet site had vanished by the time I chased my errant order, while, after much shrieking on my part to a call centre in India, another finally delivered a box that was supposed to contain a pink Barbie castle but, once the courier had sped off, opened to reveal a doggedly dark-brown pirate ship. So this year, ho hum, it's elbows sharpened and back out to the mêlée of the high street.
Spurred on by the above Christmas shopping experience, I decided to set up a consumer website where members of the public review manufacturers, products and services. As a hardened Luddite, this is akin to Roy Keane casually mentioning he's just designed a ladies handbag range. But www.youthejury.com is now born and appears to be thriving, recently claiming its first cyber-scalp by closing off the revenue stream to a dodgy website that was taking people's money and failing to deliver promised football kits. The aim is to build up an enviable database where the public help each other to make informed decisions, but of course it will live or die by their input and needs publicising. Consequently, I'm on the promotional merry-go-round and it's throwing up some interesting, instantaneous market research. Any mention on daytime television, most notably The Alan Titchmarsh Show, proves fruitful among the over-50s, who feel ignored as a demographic group and respond keenly to being asked their opinion. Predictably, a plug in Heat magazine — so powerful they have named a generation after it — yielded an impressive number of reviews, though unfortunately they were written in virtually unreadable textspeak. But the daddy of them all was my chat on Jonathan Ross's Radio 2 show, prompting hundreds of exquisitely well argued, well written reviews that needed little or no moderation.
T4ike it or not, self-promotion is a necessary evil when you have something to sell and that goes for politics too. Gordon may have been contemptuous of his predecessor's propensity for spin and hamming it up for the cameras, but he's rapidly learning that quietly 'getting on with the job', as he keeps telling us over and bloody over, doesn't cut the mustard these days. You need to blow your own trumpet, to be seen as leading, even if behind you there's a team of civil service puppeteers pulling your strings. Hence the murmurs of 'drift' from within Labour's own ranks. As Tony Blair might paraphrase the age-old saying, 'Stand by Millbank long enough and you'll see the body of your enemy drift by.'
Gordon, I'm afraid, needs to be 'sexed up' if he's to resonate with the all-important female voter. No one's suggesting he wear a leopard-print thong for PMQs, but on the political stage he has the demeanour of a dinner-party bore, telling an anecdote in all its drearily precise, `tell a lie, it was a Thursday' real time, rather than editing it to be more palatable or amusing. Even when he's saying something of value, the monotone delivery and eggy pauses make it political blah blah blah, and with a `to do' list to rival the Hutton report in length, most women just don't have time to cut through the waffle. One would imagine the greatest challenge in television news today is finding a Gordon soundbite for the opening headlines. As a leader, being thought of as masterful is a vote winner, and provided you deliver results, you can even get away with Jose Mourinho-style arrogance or downright stroppiness. But someone should tell the PM that blathering and dithering are electoral passion-killers. Just ask poor Ming Campbell. The minute the media branded him 'doddery' I knew it was all over.
T have just received a cheque for £600 from 1 Rory Bremner, which is lovely because I wasn't expecting it at all. Then it turned out this was because it wasn't actually meant for me. This comes a few weeks after Rory sent a text inviting me to the Oval to watch cricket, a game I loathe to the extent that even the highlights bore me. Turns out he'd meant to invite the same man he then later posted me a cheque for. Since the intended payee and I don't share an even faintly similar surname, I suggested poor Rory may be suffering from early-onset senility, but he assures me his dithering and confusion is purely down to being mid-run of the latest series of his rather excellent Bremner; Bird and Fortune. Either that, or his impersonation of the new Prime Minister is coming along nicely.
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