In the early Nineties I spent several years as Labour's first "high-value donor" fundraiser, during which time I saw a lot of the Labour high command, including Robin Cook. His awful death brought back a vivid memory of an impromptu supper we shared one Labour party conference. He was joined by his then secretary, Gaynor. Robin was affable, relaxed and ever-quizzical. Gaynor was reserved but warm. With hindsight, the closeness between them was unmistakable. I'm haunted by Gaynor's loss and how she will cope, or ever recover from the shock of how he died.
Robin was particularly loyal to a mutual friend of ours, the late Gerald Frankel, a businessman who founded the influential Labour Industry Forum. When Gerald lost a power struggle with ministers and advisers who wanted to take it over (he resisted strongly but failing health forced him eventually), Robin continued to invite him to smart dinners during his time as foreign secretary. Gerald always said that Robin was a cut above the rest.
I note the public mourning for Robin came from across the political spectrum. This week we are renting the villa of our friends Chris and Meg Butt, near Biarritz. Chris is famous for looking like Tom Cruise and is one of the nicest Conservative men I know. He stood unsuccessfully in the constituency of Northavon at the last election. Tactical voting was rife, and I'm rather grateful that Chris wasn't in our constituency so I wasn't tempted to do the unthinkable. Everyone knows how to team up with the opposition when required, as Ken Livingstone and Sebastian Coe recently proved when securing London's bid for the Olympics. I think we are all secretly politically polygamous and would, if possible, vote for a smattering of policies from across the party divide.
People of different views are so much more interesting anyway. Recently I've been lining up independent-minded people to take part in a debate hosted by the design consultancy Pentagram. Called "Will design ever be better understood?", it will take place at the London Design Festival in September. I've had a nice time twiddling my pencil, thinking up cool and clever people to take part. The chair will be Peter York (who is quite possibly the coolest person in the universe), and he will be joined on the panel by Julia Peyton-Jones, curator of the Serpentine Gallery; Gwyn Miles, who runs major architectural projects for the V&A; and the designer Daniel Weil, who, like all Pentagram partners, has an industrial-sized creative brain.
For the first time in more than a decade I'm working as a solo consultant rather than selling PR services as the owner-manager of a small agency. I'm free from overheads and employees as, last month, my old company, HMC, was wound up despite being profitable and successful. The cause was the financial equivalent of a tsunami (as in an unforeseen and huge bad debt). The culprit was an LA-based film production company that sub-let an expensive property from us several years ago after providing impeccable financial references. It suddenly abandoned Britain last year just as the film tax breaks dried up, leaving my company owing the rent. Its last UK-made film was, unbelievably, called Being Julia.
Actually, I'm being more Pollyanna than anything and am upbeat, editing a collection of essays on truth and the media for Atlantic Books, and cooking up a new business from the kitchen table. It is a media-monitoring company that will shed light on certain sections, starting with the comment media. It's called Editorial Intelligence and includes a mini-magazine about columnists called the Opinion Former. Having crossed the divide from PR into journalism (usually it's the other way round), I'm enjoying a proper work-life balance while forming the editorial board and commissioning articles.
I was so longing for my holiday to start last Sunday that I was ahead of myself on the final preparations - no mean feat with a total of five children between us - and even treated myself to a Saturday lunchtime nap with our youngest, who is five months old. I woke up refreshed and started lazily putting the passports in my handbag when I did a cartoon shriek: one of the children's passports had expired in March.
Edited highlights of the 36 hours that followed are that six of them were spent on the telephone to the UK passport office to get an appointment (earliest: Wednesday), while trying to establish if we could fly into Spain on an expired passport instead of France (answer: no). The remaining 30 hours were spent in an emergency overnight session at Legoland to quell rebellion among the children's ranks. Luckily, our new male Brazilian au pair had decided not to take his family's advice to return home after the Stockwell shooting, and came with us to queue and help with meltdown control brought on by overexcitement (kids) and exhaustion (me).
Total cost of a five-day delay, extended car rental - husband left before me by car - fresh flights, Legoland voyage and inevitable Lego trimmings? Don't ask. I'm a serial upgrader by nature and the four-day delay for a "priority" passport appointment was maddening. It's a pity that the only place to upgrade on Ryanair is the cockpit, but at least they have a policy of allowing people with babies on first.
Julia Hobsbawm@juliahobsbawm.com
