Max Carlish continues his amble down memory lane when he crossed paths with a young David Cameron.

There are those sliding doors moments in every life, where if we’d done something different, the whole course of history – and certainly our own personal history – would have been different.

And lunching with David Cameron, before he was famous, back in the days when he was Carlton TV’s top corporate flak-catcher and once laughingly called me ‘Bunter’, was definitely one of those sliding doors moments in my life. The search light of power briefly plays over you and then moves on – like in that title sequence to Gerry Anderson’s Captain Scarlett, a pop reference that our Prime Minister would probably get.

Like other members of his political caste – Balls, Miliband (D and E). Osborne and Clegg,  Dave had left Oxford around the same time as me and (unlike me) joined what’s been called the ‘spadocracy’; the serried ranks of mainly white, male, Oxbridge-educated special advisers to government, who turned out mainly to be politicians in waiting.

But being a Tory partly in the Heseltine mould as well as presumably being somewhat bruised as the SPAD to Norman Lamont during Black Monday, Dave was determined to get some ‘real life’ under his belt in preparation for his inevitable ascension to real power. This happened to coincide with the plans of the owner of the upstart TV conglomerate Carlton Communications, led by one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite businessmen, the ferocious Michael Green.

Carlton – and Green – were famous for slaying the giant of Thames TV in the mid-nineties and then going on to swallow the Brummie whale of Central shortly after. As a proud Brummie, I’m bound to say surely it should have been the other way round.

Green was a terrifying attack-capitalist, whose savage carpetings of his employees made the vile-mouthed Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It sound like Postman Pat. He needed someone to charm the city, and when Dave Cameron decided to do his gap year away from Westminster in the Darwinian jungle of commercial television, it seemed like a perfect match especially as he came highly recommended by his mother in law, Lady Astor.

We’d coincided at Oxford and now as young executives at Carlton and a mutual friend thought we should meet. Over soup, Dave gave me a comprehensive lecture on the ins and outs of The Bill, an unexceptional cop show made by Carlton’s deadly rivals. I now found myself staring into Dave’s watery blue eyes across the lunch table and I realized that in the crossfire of his  analysis of The Bill, I had been left with nothing to say.

But that’s not a sufficient excuse for what happened next.

Without even thinking about it or realising I was doing it, I had picked up the wrong spoon for the soup and half-way through his Bill speech I realised that there was no going back and I was going to have to carry on looking at that damn wrong spoon on the table for the rest of lunch. A silent silver reproof of my lack of table manners, that like an unpleasant smell we were both aware of but neither acknowledged. And since then, many people have expressed wonderment and incredulity that I had got to that age without anyone ever instructing me on the difference between a soup and a pudding spoon.

It’s so obvious now – one’s got a point, for cutting the pudding and the other’s round for gathering the soup. This is table manners 101, but I didn’t know it – and obviously hadn’t even clocked that there was more than one type of spoon.

And during the dawning awful realization that the spoon was going nowhere, I began to feel more and more socially inferior to Dave, even though he’s far too well bred to look down on one for such a rudimentary error. But unlike that story about Queen Victoria who was giving a banquet for an African chieftan who started eating with his hands – so she ate with her hands too – Dave didn’t switch spoons to make me feel less chavvy..

What can I say ? My mother was a hippie in the 70s and as one friend at the time summed it up – I love going to Max’s; they don’t have manners there.

I’m sure Dave’s idea of equality probably does now involve a big society where people can use the wrong cutlery without fear of discrimination. But back then, I felt that not knowing which spoon to use ruled me out of even having a dialogue with him.

The irony is that him and his friend Steve Hilton, who was also at Oxford at the same time as us, have done more to ‘de-nastify’ the Tory party than any of their predecessors, so that it’s open and even welcoming to the kind of people – like me – who don’t know the difference between a soup spoon and a pudding spoon. Not that I would ever join the Tory party.

And it’s true that on that occasion, Dave was the perfect host and didn’t bat an eyelid about the spoon; it was probably much more an issue to me than it was to him. I still think it was what I said next which was the real faux pas.

Reaching for something to say I came out with the question about Carlton’s ‘mission’ or vision – and that’s when Dave accurately predicted my inevitable corporate demise a year later. I think Dave’s distrust of vision of mission, and/or any isms, as well as and his very Tory pragmatism was of a piece with his attitude that you didn’t do ‘conviction’.

There used to be a tacky aftershave ad – people of my ancient vintage will remember it – which featured a man’s denim shirt with a female hand creeping over it, and then just when it slips through the open neck shirt, a male hand catches it. The brilliant strap-line was:  Denim, for the Man who doesn’t have to try too hard.

I suppose in many ways Dave was the outstanding man of our generation who didn’t have to try ‘too hard’. With the effortless charisma and calm in the face of his boss Michael’s torrents of bile and invective, Dave would often seem to be the most grown-up person in the room at Carlton.

I think this is the other thing that got him elected – he passes the Ken Clarke test, which asks the question who would you rather go out for a drink with: Ken Clarke or Neil Kinnock, even though you’re a solid Labour man?

Though I still consider myself to be a bit of a leftie (who is these days too impoverished to be a champagne socialist), I think I’d rather go for a drink with Cameron than with Miliband, though of course nothing would give me greater pleasure than to get to grips with Ed over his dad’s neo-endogenous theory of economic growth. Also a friend of mine was once rather creepily asked by Ed Miliband “are you a fellow traveller”, by which he meant Labour voter rather than anything else.

After that lunch, I kept in touch with Dave, and even though I feared I’d forever queered my pitch with my cutlery faux pas, Dave kept in touch with me.

As the boss Michael Green’s speech writer, Dave was always looking for good news stories, of which there were not many, Carlton being famous for its ‘crap’ telly. I had managed to sell – or thought I had – a Carlton produced series to the Sci Fi Channel which invested over 100 million pounds in original programming. By now the story David and Michael wanted to tell was that Carlton was buzzing with new production for new channels with lots of money to spend.

I got a slightly fraught call from Dave late on a Friday afternoon. I still remember my hand shaking when I heard it was him on the  phone and understood that his tone of voice meant that I wasn’t going to have a nice weekend. Remember this was way before the days that you could check news stories on your tablet device with 24 hour streaming news channels.

David was drafting a speech which  Green had been asked to make at the weekend in front of investors about how his production arm was leading the way in producing new shows for channels such as this big time Sci-Fi Channel. It was late on the Friday when Michael decided to put new facts in which, if wrong, would have made him a laughing stock. So David had called me to make sure that I was double, double sure of my facts and figures, because as he put it

‘Max, I’ve got to tell you that your Chairman’s really depending on you to get this right. If you’re not confident about these facts you need to tell me now. Because your Chairman’s going to be saying them to the investors tomorrow and if you’ve got it wrong, they’ll all know’.

And the way he said it, I was persuaded that not only was Michael Green’s reputation riding on getting these facts right, but also now my job as well. Luckily I was right on the facts and figures, but in that moment I felt the full force of Dave because despite his apparent languid laid-backness, there were things that were more important than anything.

You really didn’t want to let Dave down.

Drinking a metaphorical bucket of vomit came shortly afterwards when the series that I’d sold to the Sci-Fi Channel suddenly looked like it wasn’t happening because the exec who’d commissioned it had been fired. I still remember David saying to me, as he let me know that I would shortly be twisting in the wind for going to press with a story too early: “You have to be careful Max. You don’t want to drag your coat, before we’ve got anything to shout about”.

I’m still trying to work out what he meant.