That's a charitable way of putting it

The Guardian columnist and former Times editor Simon Jenkins is amused by the sheer weight of acknowledgments, but reckons he did enough to merit inclusion. "Tina's an old friend of mine," he says, "and was eager to know how Diana's death sat in the context of the Thatcher-Major-Blair governments. I've just written a book on Thatcherism, so we chatted over lunch. I didn't know Diana very well, but I met and talked to her on several occasions, and was able to offer some thoughts." He is, though, unconvinced by Roberts' notion that such a list supports the footnotes. "That's a charitable way of putting it," he says.
Tony Benn says he made the list for an interview Brown pressed him to do, even though he told her he had no interest in the subject, and can't recollect what they talked about. Former Observer journalist Ben Summerskill, now chief executive of gay lobby group Stonewall, says he "helped when asked", and that "it was very sweet of her to mention me as I didn't do a huge amount". The bar for inclusion does not appear to have been set very high.
After five pages of specific acknowledgments comes a magnificently eclectic list of 266 names, arranged alphabetically and accorded "thanks and appreciation": Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tony Benn, Manolo Blahnik, Professor David Cannadine, Jimmy Choo, Max Clifford, Alain de Botton, Michael Eisner, Mohamed Al Fayed, Stephen Fry, the fifth Earl of Lichfield, Eve Pollard, Colin Powell, Lord Rees-Mogg, John Travolta. The great, the good, and Henry Kissinger. But what qualified them for inclusion?