The Spectator’s Notes | 21 October 2006

These notes are being written on 17 October, the day when, at the invitation of the History Matters campaign, we are all supposed to keep a diary for a day. Like Tom Lehrer on National Brotherhood Week, ‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.’ We are overwhelmed with diaries. The politicians’ ones are the least satisfactory of the lot. Ex-ministers rush out their diaries (and memoirs) in the brief period when people can remember who they are and the colleagues they dislike are still in office. The authors play a double game — encouraging the publishers and television companies to pay big money with promises of revelations, and then suddenly getting pompous about confidentiality when it starts to look too awkward for them. Of the Ecclestone affair in Tony Blair’s first year in office, David Blunkett writes, ‘I’m not putting a lot down here in my diary’, which suggests he was already planning publication, and already editing with that in mind. As publication looms, the poor old Cabinet Office has to rush round trying to take interesting things out of the book, a mug’s game which only makes people more excited, and critical of ‘censorship’. In this case, for example, I gather there is outrage at the removal of Mr Blunkett’s remarks about Cherie Blair’s interference in political affairs, since this is not thought to be a genuine matter of national security. Finally, the diary’s victims start to answer back. Poor Martin Narey, then the director-general of the prison service, is much upset by Mr Blunkett’s criticism of him for supposed weakness over the riot in Lincoln Prison in 2002, and so has ‘set the record straight’ by revealing that Mr Blunkett rang him in a curry house in the Isle of Wight and told him to ‘machine-gun’ the inmates (of the prison, not the curry house).