In an early description of the Notting Hill gatherings, she notes that after Michael Gove joins, “the meetings begin to appear in the Spectator, which is unfortunate”. After 100 pages depicting the drama of the 2010 election campaign, Fall makes a rare use of brackets: “Three marriages break down after the 2010 election (including my own).” This is a woman who is entirely loyal and utterly without ego: even in her own book, she does not become the story.Īnd speaking of advisers who do or do not become the story, Fall, in her gentle, diplomatic way, displays a tacit awareness of the current political context. Science and Technical Research and DevelopmentĪ friend once told me that people write what they really mean in parentheses.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.

This is unfortunate for Cameron and co, of course, because it speaks to a sense of upper-class exclusivity: many of the set are old friends whose connection pre-dates politics. Unwittingly, Fall’s memoir may well revive the Notting Hill set as an important framework for understanding the rise and fall of Cameron. This book is her account of that time, an insider’s view of David Cameron’s journey to power, and what it was like when they got there. Deciding who could and couldn’t have access to the PM, she became known as the “gatekeeper”. Described by Cameron as his “wingman”, she sat at the desk directly outside his office. Others, you won’t have: namely Kate Fall, who spent more than a decade as “the most influential woman in British politics”, according to the Times journalist Alice Thomson.įall was at the centre of the Cameron project: she was his deputy chief of staff from his first day as Conservative leader to his last as prime minister. Some you have heard of, such as George Osborne and Michael Gove. Entering Downing Street some years later, Cameron was accompanied by friends from those gatherings.

The term was used, normally pejoratively and in sneering tabloid articles, to describe the tight-knit group who, in the early years of his leadership, would gather at the Camerons’ Notting Hill home to discuss policy over pizza. As the history of his time in government begins to be written, David Cameron must have been hoping the “Notting Hill set” would be largely forgotten.

Fall of a State by Kate Cotoner