Diary - 13 September 2008

There are many things I’ll miss about my year with David Cameron, not least my regular visits to Portcullis House, the ugly upside-down cow’s udder opposite the Commons (it was designed by Michael Hopkins, although it looks as though he did this in the dark, possibly using Plasticine and some peat briquettes). After a while I began to think of its lobby as a current affairs version of the bar in Star Wars, the one peopled by a galaxy of freaks. It is also something of a research assistant catwalk, and while you couldn’t reasonably compare it to the lobby of Vogue House — which, predictably, has the most glamorous front of house in London — there are enough Tamzins, Tabithas and Tamaras here to put a spring in your John Lobbs. You never get the hordes of tourists you see at the Reichstag, but they wouldn’t be disappointed if they pitched up here instead of across the road. After a couple of months it started to feel like one of those places where, if you stood there long enough, you’d bump into everyone you’d ever met, everyone you’d ever read about. You’d see Frederick Forsyth scuttling about, or Charles Clarke looking as though he was running from something large and forbidding. Steve Hilton would be rushing around barefoot in his black T-shirt and baggy shorts, and often looked so underdressed I thought he must be testing the parameters of decorum, seeing if he could get thrown out or not. His office had hinted that since moving to California he might have started wearing chalkstripe suits, but when he turned up at the book launch on Monday — flanked by Cameron, George Osborne, Andy Coulson and Ed Llewellyn — the black T-shirt was reassuringly intact.