Every time Gordon Brown repeats his fibs, this Diary is going to repeat the reminder to its readers that he's fibbing. He was at it again at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, calling David Cameron both “principal” and “chief” adviser to the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, during the Black Wednesday crisis 15 years ago. Mr Brown keeps saying this. He knows it is not true. Mr Cameron, who was 26, was working in a junior political post. He will not have been advising the Chancellor on the conduct of economic policy. Mr Brown knows this too.

Discussing a mutual acquaintance who keeps breaking into foul-mouthed language at inappropriate moments, the person talking to me remarked that “he appears to have a mild version of Debrett's syndrome”. A slip of the tongue, but unwittingly he coined a helpful addition to the language. We can now define Debrett's syndrome (“a touch of Debrett's”, we might say) as “insistent name-dropping to no useful purpose”.

Tanning parlours (as I shall be remarking to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire when I see her next) look set to be banned in Scotland for the under-18s. Aren't we getting into a bit of a tangle with our different ages of consent? A couple of gay youths may enter a civil partnership at 16 but may not enter a tanning parlour in Scotland until they are 18.

Two young gay friends of mine once became (I am shocked to report) inordinately smitten with each other while on a tanning bed together in a club somewhere. During the protracted period of heedlessness that followed, they suffered serious burns to their bottoms. It is a comfort to know that at least one aspect of their behaviour may soon be forbidden by Scottish law.

I like remembrance services. Unlike christenings and weddings, they are short, they are final and there are no false hopes or family photographs. Besides, the late Geoffrey Roberts was a fine man and a steady comrade when I was the new young MP for West Derbyshire, and he, in a series of posts, helped to run the West Derbyshire Conservative Association; so I wanted to remember him.

So there I stand in the rain on Tuesday morning, outside Bakewell's imposing parish church, for the service. The church is empty. I've got the time wrong. The service is at 1pm but I've got it into my head that it's 11, probably because both figures have ones in them.

The church clock peals the hour and I shudder. That familiar bell always unsettles me. It woke me every morning during my first election campaign nearly 30 years ago, renewing at each awakening a sense of dread that my luck might not hold and something was awful was going to happen. Already it had, when at the start of the campaign an insolent letter I'd written from Margaret Thatcher's office to a complaining correspondent had hit the front pages of every newspaper in Britain. And then I addressed a Conservative ladies' coffee morning in Ashbourne with my trousers undone, by mistake.

In the rain in Bakewell now, my suit is getting wet: the suit I got on leaving Parliament precipitately, seven years later in 1986, for a TV career with Weekend World - when Geoffrey had been so pleasant and level about it all. “Geoffrey dealt with things,” as an old friend will be saying from the pulpit.

But not for two hours, and that suit will be soaked - a good suit, from Gieves & Hawkes, but a bit frayed now. In the downpour I study the tombstones, as I love to do.

That church bell; my Weekend World suit; Geoffrey's death; the soaking Derbyshire rain... Stray threads converging again. A woman walks down the church path, beneath a black umbrella. From among the tombstones I wish her a cheery good morning. She looks away and hurries past with no reply. Odd.

Repairing to The Castle for some warming coffee, I visit the loo. Only then do I realise that my trousers must have been undone all morning.

So it's come to this. Flashing Bakewell ladies in the rain in a threadbare suit among the tombstones in a graveyard. “And to think (they'll say) he used to be our MP.” Geoffrey, with his twinkling, affable cynicism, would be chuckling now.

I join him, laughing out loud, intemperately, alone, in an empty Midlands pub, on a wet Tuesday morning in January.

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