Peterborough is an unusual name for a diary. It was named after a tiny thoroughfare next to the Telegraph’s former Fleet Street offices. The Mail, wary perhaps of being seen to steal intellectual property, decided to name their column after the rather nondescript Cambridgeshire town, which for them epitomised Middle England. The idea of it being a sanctum had been more appropriate. “Old” Peterborough was something of a mythical place created by young men with un-ironed shirts and a taste for comic English prose, religion, Conservative politics, the countryside and cricket.

The career of a diarist is usually short and full of trouble. It had been so in my case. Bristling with enthusiasm for a career in journalism, I had heard that Peterborough was the way in. Young hopefuls were advised to phone in stories. I pumped my university contemporaries, scoured the local papers and turned up to obscure events, praying that something would go wrong. The joy of finally getting a shift was great. But you soon realised that was only the beginning. On every shift you faced that moment, at about 10.45am, when Quentin Letts would say: “So what have you got for me today?” The trick was to tell the most pathetic story in the most convincing voice possible. With luck, he wouldn’t yawn. Ideally he would bring out a list of things he would prefer you to be getting on with.

I soon began to realise that the whole business was inherently unfair. I had to dash around the country to get ideas, but my colleague Henry Dimbleby could phone up his mum, his dad, his uncle or his aunt – a family mixing in the right circles and knowing what to look out for. Still, being in the office was rather exciting. I would see Bill Deedes totter by, overhear David Twiston-Davies commission letters from his contacts in Tunbridge Wells, and have lunch in the canteen with ’Reen, the Irish secretary. ’Reen was like a post-university matron. If you’d stitched someone up and they phoned in high dudgeon, she would take the call. She would hand out all the party invitations, pick out the tailpiece – the gently amusing misprint from something like a parish newsletter – and have a surreptitious smoke every afternoon at 4.30.

The column provided a wonderful social life. I got to go to things like a monstrously tedious slide show of Colonel Blashford Snell’s latest Amazon expedition and sit among the luvvies during first nights. And once event organisers were aware that Peterborough was in the house, really pretty girls came up to talk to you. Indeed finding a pretty girl for the column was one of the easier ways to get a story. There were three criteria. Is she pretty? Is her father a lord? Does she have a double-barrelled name? Then any tenuous hook – her charity expedition to Namibia/new novel/toff boyfriend – would get her in.

It all sounds tremendous fun. But in terms of it being a job, it was most impractical. During the day you would discover that A N Wilson’s daughter was taking your place next week because she was on half term. Often, like Oliver Twist, you would have to phone up to ask for your payments. It was the last days of the young fogies going out to Foyle’s lunches in their pinstripe suits. After Quentin Letts left for New York, I remember turning up for one shift and there was a chap on the desk who wasn’t even wearing a tie. Time was up. The younger generation didn’t want to read about aristocratic hairpieces, Captain Birdseye beards and WI ladies reaching for the smelling salts. They wanted celebrities. Probably because the “old world” didn’t exist any more. It probably hadn’t existed for 20 years, but until then its departure just hadn’t bothered The Daily Telegraph.

So it was with some surprise, when others and I were settled in more mundane and obscure employments, that a call came through to say that the Daily Mail was going to bring it back. But maybe the Daily Mail does have a hotline to Middle England, because for the first few weeks it worked well. As we all contemplated a messy ground war in the Gulf, readers still had an appetite for humorous stories. Maybe we are at heart a martial nation and when we’re walloping Johnny Foreigner all our institutions make sense again, I theorised. One of my first stories was very Carry-on-up-the-Khyber. An English headmistress was still in her post in Kuwait, stocking up with G&Ts despite the threat of bombs landing outside. I pestered the MoD to give me a run down on how the army dogs were getting on. I also visited the Baghdad Restaurant in Westbourne Grove to cheer up the staff and give a plug to “the most unfortunately named restaurant in Britain”.

I confess I was a bit rusty. I had forgotten how to address the toffs and phoned up the House of Lords and asked for Baron X. Former Royal Correspondent Robert Hardman overheard me and nearly passed out with horror. “It’s always Lord,” he sighed. As we got back into the swing of things, I realised diarists aren’t real human beings at all. They step right out of novels. Quentin Letts lives in a PG Wodehouse timewarp, where men harrumph and ladies trill. Robert Hardman reminded me of Corker in Scoop, when he announced: “Right, the conflict is now over. Baghdad zoo – that’s the next big story. Find out what’s happened to the lions.”

Peterborough is actually the cutting edge of journalism. It is no coincidence that Titans such as Auberon Waugh, Bill Deedes and Charles Moore began their careers there. Columnists have to employ sharp lateral thinking to fill the page each day. Whenever there was something like a town criers’ contest, it was our job to phone round the chemists to see if there was a run on cough lozenges. If Mr Putin was in town, had consumption of vodka gone up? We had to use great ingenuity to generate copy about Trafalgar Day, Empire Day, hot cross buns and Maundy money. And we identified the things the readers really care about: the demise of the steak and kidney pudding.

However, it wasn’t long before I experienced diarist’s despair: sitting in front of a totally flat story, which was bereft of facts or jokes, with only two hours left before the column went to the subs. A colleague on Dempster called it “polishing a turd”. Another old hand told me that an even older hand had advised him that having a few snifters or some recreational drugs was the way to make your sentences soar. Who would have imagined that the Peterborough column could have been fuelled by amphetamines? I did develop an admiration for those old hands who could turn base metal into gold. They deserve the high salaries that top diary editors earn.

I very much enjoyed my first long lunch in many years at Rules in Covent Garden. But on my return I was chastised for foregoing a pudding. I had adapted too much to the modern way. While the Mail continued to support the column, it soon became hesitant about building an infrastructure around it. It wanted to eschew Metropolitan gossip in favour of heartwarming stories from the provinces. It cut the incentive payments for bringing in stories. Going out of the office was frowned upon. We spent the day trawling the country’s local news websites. Rory Knight Bruce, a former editor of Londoner’s Diary on the Evening Standard, was summoned from his Devon hedgerow to run the column. But he was never actually allowed to create it in his own image. Humorous writers are very idiosyncratic and need to be given time to acquire confidence. The column was using six experienced writers, who frequently rewrote each other’s material. Morale dipped. To run a successful diary, you need to answer all the readers’ letters, you need a budget to encourage a band of freelances in remote outposts to look for stories, and you need to convince the journalists that they will still be there in two weeks’ time.

The galling thing was that the readers wrote in to say that the things they liked most about the new column were the bits they sent in themselves – the “One Line Philosophers” and the “Out of the Mouths of Babes” panels. As the tension surrounding the Gulf war subsided, we realised we were under threat. We were safe if Mr Dacre, on his return, mistook the column for a hearing-aid advertisement. If he read it, we were doomed. However much the readers wrote letters like: “I agree with everything Peterborough says” and, “I’ve given up the Telegraph to go over to the Mail”, we were aware that maintaining the column was expensive – and they already had Dempster (recently replaced by Richard Kay), Ephraim Hardcastle and Wicked Whispers. We arrived one Monday at the end of August to learn that all of us were no longer required.

We had got some classic stories along the way. How John Prescott got stuck in a train lavatory. The youth who ran off with the Bishop’s mitre during an ordination service. The policeman who hurtled to the scene of a dangerous gas leak and heroically plugged the hole with a liquorice allsort. But, to be honest, it was a bit of a relief to be fired. I had had to come home and explain I had written about a talking frog from Tewkesbury, a budgerigar who whistled the 1812 Overture, and Laddie the donkey who attributed his longevity to a diet of bananas. Diaries are a young man’s game.

The freelances who had started phoning the stuff in were disappointed to hear it was all over. Where else could you sell a story about a friendly octopus, veteran reunions and parachuting nuns? “All the columns are full of upper middle class gossip – people who are already known,” said one. “They look inwardly.” In the modern world, there is no place for those wry stories of English eccentricity from the provinces. It is presumed that people live in communities. Peterborough columnists knew that most people don’t and actually prefer to live in an imaginary world of timeless camp.

The Mail hasn’t actually lost the Peterborough column; it has just decided to make it an extension of the letters page. We had a few days trying to encourage the readers to send in their own stories of how they overcame adversity, but the elegance and wit has been replaced by chicken soup for the soul. The end result is the same as the first magazine I put together, at primary school when aged 11, with my grandfather: limericks, banal tales and jokes. The tone of repressed English melancholy has been replaced by American mawkishness. The fogies have had to slink away and contemplate re-inventing themselves again for a harsher world.