My growing concerns over Dave's new "favourite thinker"

I am here to smooth the path for the Cameron summer holiday. A perfectly reasonable assignment, but one somewhat overshadowed by Saint Peter Mandelson having been here before us. You might have thought that some bright spark would have remembered how badly the combination of Tory high-flyer, Mandelson and Corfu played out last year and suggested Sam'n'Dave take a "staycation" (my early vote, incidentally, for ugliest neologism of the year). But no, such an obvious consideration failed to cross their pretty vacant minds and, as a result, here we are in bloody Corfu.
The third coming of Saint Peter is, in part, our own silly fault.

It may have been me but, with hindsight, I am almost certain it was Letwin who said that the perfect way to discomfit The Clunking Fist up in the Lake District would be to put it about that Mandy might be on the verge of replacing him as PM. To this end, the proposition was advanced to a group of credulous journalists who, sure as eggs is eggs, reprinted it word for word.

All quite amusing until Dave, who for the past two weeks has been talking, with no apparent humility, about the second term, calls me in for a conflab and says Coulson and he think that Mandelson is the one man who might derail the whole Cameroon project (he has taken to referring to his project in the always worrying third person).

What Tabloid Man thinks is, of course, entirely irrelevant. What Dave thinks, however, still carries some sway with people who matter. And the revelation (over to you, Mr Freud) that our leader is petrified by the prospect of fighting an election against an openly gay man is a disquieting one. Not least because the more I try to reassure him with comforting anecdotes about some of the less reliable members of staff at Heatherdown, the more shaky he becomes. It appears that despite sharing a dormitory with him for five formative years, I may have missed something.

All of which is unsettling, but not half as concerning as that my holiday companion, and Dave's new "favourite thinker", is Phillip "Two L's Please" Blond. Sweet Jesus, this alumnus of Hull, yes Hull, is a master of platitudes - you try taking a three-hour flight seated next to a man who says, "We are now in a society without communities", every ten minutes.

On and on and on he will go about his "Red Toryism", not to mention his chequered background. I nearly choked on the inevitable olive during the following exchange at a disappointing taverna.

“The thing is, Gidders [Gidders?], not only was I born in inner-city Merseyside . . ."
“I think we may have covered this, Two L's . . ."
“But my stepbrother is Daniel Craig, aka James Bond."
“Un-huh."
“Which makes me simultaneously working class and very upper class."
It appears that "our favourite thinker" believes that having a relative who plays a part based on novels written by an Etonian somehow makes him one of the old school. Quite baffling.

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