DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
MONDAY Off to New York with Dave and DD next week! Am working flat out on preps. First priority: which hotel? It’s the Four Seasons versus Soho House. While East 57th Street says ‘statesmen-in-waiting’, the Meatpacking District says ‘modern, vibrant and cool’. This is what Jed calls a Fork in the Road.
Meetings set up with Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Tina Brown and Robert De Niro (subject to confirmation). No word yet from Hillary. Surely she will agree to a top-secret informal breakfast summit?
Have just heard Poppy is coming too. Am trying not to see this as undermining me but rather that we will be glamorous power pals, a bit like Sex and the City only with brains. (Needless to say, I am the free-spirited Carrie Bradshaw, and she is the prim one obsessed with finding a husband.)
TUESDAY New office is chaos. My packing box hasn’t arrived and Nigel says if it doesn’t turn up by end of week I’m to list its contents for insurance claim purposes. This is no good. You can’t replace Pony Club desk tidies! In all the upheaval I said the wrong thing to a reporter when he asked who was getting our married couple’s tax allowance and I said inclusively — ‘Everyone!’ It seems I missed an email from Jed telling us that just because the party chairman says something doesn’t make it so, and could we desist from simply repeating what ‘any old shadow Cabinet member’ says without checking with him. ‘Such lazy and dangerous practices must end. Need I remind you that until further notice the Tory party is the absentee father of British politics? Commitment-phobic. See me if you need this further explained.’ WEDNESDAY Am shattered. DD rang three times last night about NY, including at 3 a.m. to ask whether I’d prepared some tedious briefing on Zero Tolerance policing. Said he couldn’t get hold of Poppy, but I bet you any tax break she’s turned her phone off so I have to deal with it. Went to take Jed his mid-morning muffin and he was sitting on the floor in the middle of a load of packing boxes surrounded by screwedup paper. Shouted at me to ‘Sit!’ while he read out his draft rules for the tax allowance.
He’s drawn up a baffling document which states: ‘Eligibility: Couples whether married, or in civil partnership, with children of school age, including those remarried with children from different relationships, but excepting those whose children are living mainly with a previous partner, and those separated but not divorced.’ I told him it was catchy.
THURSDAY Can I just say: will people please stop writing in with witty colour slogans? We’ve got enough. Vote Yellow Get Brown, Vote Brown Get Red, Vote Blue Go Green, Vote Blue Go Pink. We’re covered. If you want to help, you could think up some policies.
Thankfully, it seems we’ve cracked the marriage problem. Jed called us in to say that the system will be graded, starting with an initial benefit of £100 for getting hitched, then £150 for each declarable child. People might start having lots of children to get tax breaks, but if that gets out of hand we could impose a cap on the number of declarable children allowed per family. Then he threw it open: ‘So if that were the policy, what would be the headline?’ All I said was ‘Cash for kiddies’. It was meant to be witty. His reaction was, as Mr Hague would say, disproportionate.
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