This site seems to have become a repository for obituaries and tributes in the last week, and I am afraid here’s another one.

John and I first met Corinne De Souza back in 1997 just after we opened Politico’s. It turned out that unbeknown to me at the time I had taken over her job at the PR firm Charles Barker back in January 1990. She became a very good friend to us both and also became a shareholder in Politico’s. Her book, SO YOU WANT TO BE A LOBBYIST, was one of the first books published by Politico’s Publishing in 1998. It was, it has to be said, not a brilliant book, as she herself admitted later. Only last year did she admit that she gave us the wrong disk… I had to laugh.

Corinne was one of the sweetest people John and I knew. She died on Thursday after a six month battle with lung cancer. When she first told us the diagnosis back in September she was only supposed to have two or three weeks to live. But it was only in her last few days that her health deteriorated very dramatically. She had come to terms with her death and planned every last detail of not only her last few months but also her funeral. John was with her when she died, along with several other of her close friends. She never complained once about her illness and bore it great fortitude. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.

Corinne, as she would herself admit, was slightly eccentric. No, she was very eccentric. Two stops short of Dagenham would be another way of describing her. But in a good way. I remember one year she came to help us sell books at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth. She drove down from London with our friend Rena. Corinne’s sense of direction left something to be desired, and as they drove along the M3 she suddenly said: “Sweetie, shouldn’t the sea be on the other side?” Somehow they ended up driving towards Portsmouth rather than Bournemouth.

It has to be said that Corinne wasn’t a natural retail sales assistant. She accessorised her bottle green Politico’s branded sweatshirt with a rather fetching neckscarf, and point blank refused to sell our politically themed knickers. “Sweetie, I couldn’t possibly sell them,” she bleated. Most of her sentences invariably started with the word “Sweetie”. I remember a very funny moment in Politico’s, just after George Bush’s Axis of Evil speech, when John was filling in the conference application forms. Corinne and Rena were upstairs in the coffee shop. John shouted up to them and this is how the conversation went…

JOHN: Corinne, I need your date of birth and where you were born!
CORINNE: 1955, Baghdad.
JOHN: Okaaaay… Rena?
RENA: 19xx, Tehran
JOHN: Riiiiight…. Oh. Right.

Corinne was born in Iraq to an English mother and an Iraqi father who worked as an agent for SIS. She wrote a book about him called BAGHDAD SPY. She had a very English upbringing, though and retained a delightful, sweet naivete about life in general for all her life. She was far too willing to place her trust in people who would let her down. One in particular.

Corinne started her own publishing company, Picnic Publishing. She was determined to make it succeed on her own and her stubborn streak prevented her from taking advice or well-meant help from others. When I found out she was having terrible distribution problems I offered to help sell her books through Biteback’s sales agents. There was nothing in it for us, but I knew it was the only way she could get her books out into the market. But she refused because she thought I was doing it out of charity. I explained that I was doing it as a friend, and not out of charity, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

It has to be said that Corinne was taken from this earth at a much too young age – 58. She outlived her beloved mother by little more than a year. She really was one of the sweetest, kindest people I have ever met. Those who knew her will miss her infectious laugh and happy go lucky nature. Her funeral will be a very sad event indeed.