Diary – 5 October 2002

And so to Blackpool. But how? Train: disgracefully expensive, probably delayed, full of broadsheet journalists (apart from the Independent), possibility of being jumped in the buffet carriage by a beaming Richard Branson dispensing pork pies. Car: long, boring, held up by roadworks and impoverished Independent journalists in jalopies. Plane: ten minutes from Canary Wharf to City airport, no queues, prompt 40-minute flight. And, most crucially, via Manchester. Now, I won’t labour the football in a rugger bugger’s bible, but the last time I went to Manchester was in May to see Arsenal win the double in Sir Alex Ferguson’s backyard. Better than sex? It was better than hearing that my great friend Cherie Blair had endured a bad trip to the hairdresser and emerged with bright-red dreadlocks hours before Tony’s big speech. ‘United fan?’ I asked the cab driver. ‘Ermmm …yes,’ he replied with that unmistakable new air of hesitant-Mancunian disillusioned despondency. The 40-minute ride to Blackpool flew by after that. ‘Ever thought of using your taxi to get Lauren Blanc up for corners?’ Silence. ‘Diego still Forlorn?’ A tut. ‘Keane had his lobotomy yet?’ Shake of the head. I did give him a big tip, though. ‘Go on holiday next May.’ Oh, how he chuckled.

Party conferences are wonderful things. All those drunken, vile, backbiting, hypocritical, sneering, self-interested, amoral creeps together in one heaving cesspit. And that’s just the journalists. It’s the one time every year when politicians confirm with their own eyes that the fourth estate, which so loves to expose their ghastly peccadillos, is just as ghastly as they are. My first conference was the Tories at Bournemouth in 1994. The News of the World, under my new editorship, had recently exposed Alan Clark’s affair with that judge’s coven, and I arrived to find him haranguing some of my executives in a disturbingly animated way.