Hague aide shocks party with 'secret video diary'

Amanda Platell has quit her post as the Conservatives' head of news and media and will reveal the inside story of the party's general election campaign in a personal video diary next week.

Her 45-minute television programme, nicknamed "The Secret Diary of Amanda Platell, aged 43 and a half" – after the Adrian Mole books – was filmed late at night when she returned to her Knightsbridge hotel after a long day at Conservative Central Office.

Ms Platell recorded about 30 hours of her thoughts on the highs and lows of the Tory campaign with Zad Rogers, the son of the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside, who is executive producer of the programme to be screened by Channel 4 on Sunday week, called Unspun: Amanda Platell's Secret Diary.

The film will be anxiously awaited by the contenders in the race to succeed her former boss William Hague, to see if it includes any clues to alleged tensions between him and Michael Portillo. But her friends insisted yesterday that the programme was "William's story".

Ms Platell, who left her post on Wednesday, said last night: "So much was being written second-hand about what was going that I wanted to set the record straight. It portrays William Hague's courageous, almost heroic, battle against the odds, and tells what really happened."

She kept her project a secret from Mr Hague and her fellow Tory officials. Other than Ideal World Productions, the film company, only her mother and father knew of it. If the Tories had won the election, she would have given her video diary to her parents as a present.

Former colleagues of Ms Platell at Conservative Central Office were shocked to learn of her project yesterday. Her decision to quit was less of a surprise. Australian-born Ms Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Express and former managing director of The Independent, was one of Mr Hague's closest allies and was always considered unlikely to stay on under another leader.

Mr Hague makes clear today that he intends to remain in politics and will stand for Parliament as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire, again at the next general election. He plans to become a champion for rural Britain, although he also hopes to take up other interests outside politics, possibly in business.

He tells the Darlington and Stockton Times that he and his wife, Ffion, intend to start a family. "Certainly I shall have more time for family and more time for my existing family. I shall have more time to spend with Ffion and who knows what the effect of that will be," he said.