Hugo Rifkind today picks up on a point in my Cameron interview where I describe how he has the ring tone from 24 on his phone. “‘It’s an in joke,’ Cameron says, impenetrably”. If this sounds baffling, it is my fault. First it’s not the theme tune but that very specific telephone ring on the CTU, with which aficionados will be familiar. Also, it’s not just Cameron but a few of his staff who have the ringtone. Anyone who has seen 24 where Jack Bauer is seconds away from death or the world collapsing and finds a fresh disaster following every triumph, will understand why Cameron sympathises with the character. I didn’t put all this in my column, hence the confusion.
Next, Michael Portillo. Iain Dale has pointed out how the former defence secretary kept himself to himself at the BBC election night coverage and came across as very antisocial. It must have looked very dodgy: Portillo was sitting on the sofa reading a book when everyone else was chatting (aside from Dale, blogging so furiously). When my Spectator colleague Clemency Burton Hill sat beside him on the sofa, he reached into his bag and handed her one of his books to read. This must have looked even less comprehensible.
The explanation is that Portillo is a Booker Prize judge this year and has to get through something like 100 titles in a short deadline. Like everyone, he’d been asked to arrive very early by the BBC and ended up hanging on far longer than he had expected to. None of the BBC screens had sound (a Jamie Cullum album was playing instead), so no guests were able to gather what was going on with the elections. So we couldn’t even gossip about the results!
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