Diary

1 September 2007

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane.

This summer I spent quite a bit of time with David Cameron, most revealingly during the run-up to the Ealing Southall by-election, and just before he flew off to Rwanda (which, as almost every newspaper chose to ignore, was actually after he had already visited the flooded areas in his constituency). On a train to Nottingham one day, as we discussed the political paternoster, and his own particular place on it (which at the time felt as though it were about to descend with some force), he talked about his British bill of rights with a lot more passion than Jack Straw did when telling the media the government was appealing against the decision to allow Learco Chindamo to stay in the country. Pity for Cameron more people didn’t see it. Oh, and while the ‘Brown bounce’ (copyright all newspapers) has taken everyone by storm (not least the rubberised PM himself), may I refer you to the opening chapter of Robert Harris’s Imperium (yet another holiday read), where Apollonius Molon is instructing our hero Marcus Tullius Cicero in the art of public speaking. ‘“What about the content of what I say?” Cicero asked. “Surely I will compel attention chiefly by the force of my arguments?” Molon shrugged. “Content does not concern me. Remember Demosthenes: ‘Only three things count in oratory. Delivery, delivery, and again: delivery.’”’

Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ.