������̳

“Summertime…and the livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin’…”

I swing my feet up on the desk in my office at 4 Millbank, open Don DeLillo's excellent Underworld, and buzz my assistant to mix me another Martini. Another 47 days until Parliament's back, so no need to worry about work…

WHOA! Stop right there.

The MPs may be away from Westminster, the papers may report Tony Blair in Barbados, but our newsroom is a hive of activity. Hmmm… not quite a hive, perhaps. To be truthful, there’s an air of summer calm about the place.

In parliamentary termtime, producers charge around screaming at each other; correspondents huddle to calibrate the latest Blair/Brown rift; and – a bit like that old film - picture editors burst out of edit suites, tape in hand, to sprint along the corridor and get their lead story into before George and Natasha have finished reading the headlines. (Yes we do still work on old tape technology, sadly.)

In the summer, it’s more relaxed. Politics doesn’t stop, but it generally goes a little slower. We still of course need a core team to cover whatever happens, so I can’t let everyone go off on holiday.

This year for example there’s been an important political dimension to the two big August stories, the Middle East crisis, and the alleged terror bombing plot. David Cameron has launched a new party logo, and revamped his candidate A-list to try to get more women into Parliament. There’s even a leadership contest going on. (No I don’t mean between Gordon Brown and John Reid – that one’s not officially started yet; I mean .)

But while the daily news ticks over, what we’re all really doing here is planning the autumn. And in this, there’s a certain symmetry between the political parties and political newsrooms. Many people in the Westminster world may be “recharging their batteries,” but most of us are also working ahead on the next phase of the political story.

So our focus is on the party conferences which get underway early in September. Like buses, you wait all year, then they all come along together. The TUC, this year in Brighton, often sets the tone for Labour; hot on its heels – and handily in the same place - come the Lib Dems; then Labour swing into Manchester, breaking the seaside tradition; and finally the Conservatives, opting this year for Bournemouth.

We will do an enormous amount of broadcasting from these conferences. So now, in these quieter August days, we’re putting the building blocks in place for that – planning our coverage, negotiating space for a few desks in some God-forsaken conference centre car park, and booking hotel rooms.

Away from that, there’s all the admin that needs to be done to keep a news team ticking over – and which never seems to get done when Parliament is sitting. Completing appraisals, filling gaps in staffing, designing a new rota for the producers, that sort of thing.

So Don DeLillo will have to wait until I get home. And sadly even if I did have the time and inclination for Martinis, I don’t have an assistant to mix them.

But at least the pace IS a little less frenetic, which gives us all the time and space to think.

“So hush little baby, don’t you cry…”