The cheesy habits of David Cameron, the loneliness of Boris Johnson, the strange rise of Gavin Williamson… Swire’s no-holds-barred Diary of an MP’s Wife is causing consternation among its subjects. Is she worried?
In the kitchen of Chaffcombe Manor, her rambling Devonshire home, Sasha Swire, whose mischievously indiscreet political diaries are published this week, appears to be suffering from a bad case of the writerly equivalent of buyer’s remorse. Round and round the table she goes, as busy as one of her bees, pausing only occasionally to fling open the door of her Aga, into which she then carefully inserts her bum (I think the idea is to warm it up, but given that the weather is fine today, perhaps it’s more a matter of comfort). “Oh, please don’t put that in,” she yelps at one point, my having brought up a particularly choice entry from 2012, in which Michael Heseltine pretends, at a private dinner, that the Queen has asked him to form a government (he then proceeds to appoint his various guests to his imaginary cabinet). But it’s in your book, I say: all the world will be able to read it soon. She performs another frantic circuit of the room. “Oh, I beg you. Please don’t write about that.”
Is she really worried? Apparently, she is. Earlier this year, when she emailed, out of the blue, a literary agent, wondering whether the diaries she kept between 2010 and 2019 would be of any wider interest, this – the jamboree of publication – was almost impossible to imagine. But now, it’s a terrible reality. Her friends (and enemies) are about to find out just what she and her husband, Hugo, formerly the Conservative MP for East Devon, think of them. Michael Gove will discover that they regard him as “ever so slightly bonkers” (after our meeting, Gove’s wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, will publish two vicious ripostes, complaining of Swire’s poshness and insisting she barely knows her). Boris Johnson will learn that she believes he is “desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside”. Worst of all, David Cameron, under whom her husband, his friend and fellow old Etonian, served as a minister, will have to make his lucrative speeches knowing that his audience is now fully acquainted with the fact that he’s the kind of guy who likes to talk penis size at parties (on the occasion of George Osborne’s birthday in 2013, the PM could be found laughing uproariously at Hugo’s likening of Gove’s member to a Slinky – a toy for which, Sasha writes, their generation has a particularly fond “attachment”).
