DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
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, sleeping with prisoners.
Still, at least one good thing has come from the ‘lags and shags’ debacle, as Nigel likes to call it: Poppy is ecstatic. DD is finally ringing her in the middle of the night. Thank heavens. It was becoming painful to listen to her whining on about the lack of intrusive phone calls demanding obscure crime statistics, ‘Well, he did with all his other researchers’ etc.
FRIDAY ‘DD wants to kill someone’, according to Poppy. She sounds a little afraid. Apparently he rang her in the dead of night and started raving so badly that she put the phone down, hid under the covers and pulled a sickie today. ‘They gotta let me at him’ has become DD’s catchphrase. ‘I killed Blunkett and Hughes — I can take out Clarke. Just you wait!’ I tell her that this is what she signed up for.
She says DD is furious because Mr Maude and nice Mr Letwin have teamed up to stop him doing anything ‘nasty’. All aggressive statements are forbidden under a code of (nice) behaviour called The Maude Protocol.
Things came to a head at a meeting to discuss how to handle the Clarke–Prescott row. Every time DD suggested something, they shouted: ‘Too nasty! Too nasty!’ Poppy said they looked like a couple of panto dames waving their arms in mock distress as though they were about to faint. Nigel said ‘I predict a riot’, but nobody knew what he was on about. SATURDAY
My first weekend duty! Had to consult the Tie Guidelines this morning. Lovely Mr Hammond rang in to ask if he should wear one for his TV appearance tomorrow morning or whether it was an open shirt call. I couldn’t tell him off the top of my head — it’s so complicated. According to the guidelines, Sunday mornings are ‘no tie’, but then you have to crosscheck with the issue up for discussion, which in this case is pensions and that is quite serious, and serious issues can require a tie, depending on the TV channel. In the end I had to call Nigel at Chessington World of Adventures. He sounded a bit cross at first but quickly conceded that this was a serious matter I could not afford to get wrong. We discussed it until his phone ran out of battery, then I had to make what we describe in the business as ‘a judgment call’.
MONDAY I can’t believe it. DC rang Nigel to complain that one of his frontbenchers looked scruffy on television and is demanding to know who told him to take off his tie in contravention of subsection 3 of the appendix to the guidelines, which states clearly that a tie is required when talking about means-testing. Is it me, or is it starting to look a bit like he’s making things up as he goes along?
tamzin.lightwater@spectator.co.uk
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