Diary – 2 November 2002

Editing a newspaper is not a dinner party, as Chairman Mao would have observed had he been running a tabloid, but you sure do get invited to dinners and lunches and breakfasts, most of which are politely turned down because there is a paper to publish and competitors to clobber mercilessly and ceaselessly. But, thanks to the influence of the peerless political-reporting team at the Times, some invitations arrive which can’t be summarily rejected even if the reporters have to provide the verbal equivalent of subtitles by translating the lofty concepts or subtle intrigues being articulated by our hosts. So, it was clear on the eve of the Bournemouth conference during a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith that the next few days of speeches would mark a turning point for the Conservative party, even though it was obvious that he would lose his voice long before the delegates retreated from the seaside. With this insider knowledge, it was no surprise that IDS spent much of the conference sucking on lozenges, or that Theresa May, the party chairman, strode on to the stage in those striking leopard-print heels and lambasted her beloved ‘nasty party’.

Over the past week, the highfalutin dining and the gathering of intelligence have been done in the company of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Do these invitations come in pairs? And who has the more sophisticated political palate? Food has been over-intellectualised – much as every football fan is now a student of philosophy and every act of gardening is an existential exercise – but there are lessons to be drawn from how people eat, even if the dishes are not prepared by a celebrity vamp or a ladle lad. Last Tuesday, the Prime Minister served a Moroccan stew, with green side salad, at No. 10, while the Chancellor provided a modern interpretation of the truck-stop breakfast at No.