A Lobbyist’s Diary:

The Select Committee Sweatshop

Rupert Fotheringay-Smythe

Also in this section:

• Anecdote corner: Mark Oaten Julian Hall
• If I were PM: Alan B’Stard

To Portcullis House, for the latest round of the public administration select committee’s star chamber on lobbying. If footballers brought us spit-roasting, what the committee members do to witnesses here might best be described as pot-roasting, judging by the fatsos who have been called.

I bump into my old chum Jingo, who has been called to justify his ghastly firm’s insistence that it can regulate itself, thank you very much. He is a wobbling bundle of nerves – so, seizing the moment, I tell him that the sweaty armpits are still instinctively deferential. And those who have seen an election hoving into view, and would dearly love elevation to the Other Place, are looking to make friends with any old Lord.

“Play up that you work for a Lord,” I whisper to Jingo. And, d’you know, the silly bugger seems to forget I’ve been trying to get his boss’s Mugabe account for months, nods sagely, and 20 minutes later, with moisturiser glistening on his puffy cheeks, he’s waving a hand imperiously in front of the sweaty-armpits and saying that his ghastlies enjoy the highest standards of probity because “his lordship wouldn’t allow anything less”. The sweaty-armpits visibly stiffen. Jingo will be reduced to paying for PR Week’s lunch for the foreseeable future. Hilarious.

Just as Alastair Campbell didn’t call Gordon “mad as a badger”, nor did Stephen Carter give me a drink in Number 10 the other evening and tell me it was all his idea to get Cherie to say God’s gift to the Middle-east peace process was helping Brown to win the election. Apparently, focus groups have been telling No10 they all expected Gordon to be better because nothing could be worse than Cherie and Genghis Tone. It follows that any reminder of the Connaught Square Couple, who these days carry about as much domestic clout as Neil and Christine Hamilton, will make the country grateful for Gordon.  Expect to see Sarah Brown giving her clothes to charity shops, he chortles, to contrast her with Cherie’s Supermarket Sweep. I tell him it could backfire – after all, Blair’s been telling Brown how to win elections for 15 years. It’ll be like Thatcher telling Major how to win in ’97.