Sex-mad and dangerous
Sasha Swire — whose favourite ice-breaker was ‘Do you still sleep with your wife?’ — dazzled men with a swivel of her hips and a whiff of her perfume. So can the MP’s wife behind the most scurrilous political diary for a generation survive the deep freeze of social Siberia?
HOW frightfully unfair it is on gorgeous, glamorous Sasha Swire to judge her by her conversations with those famous politicians — royals, too — after she jotted down every lip- smacking detail night after night in her secret diary.
How much fairer to remember the willowy beauty who mesmerised men — such as David Cameron — with a sway of her slim hips and a whiff of her expensive perfume. Or flirting with a plutocrat at a Buckingham Palace banquet and noting approvingly to herself — after he offers to whisk her to Corsica on his superyacht — that it’s ‘nice my husband thinks I can still pull’.
Sex, discussing it and complaining about the lack of it is a constant feature of Sasha’s newly published Diary Of An MP’s Wife. ‘David talks a lot about sex,’ she says of our former prime minister in one Bridget Jonesstyle entry.
But he’s not the only one. At a Chequers dinner party Lady Swire, 57, whose father Sir John Nott was Defence Secretary at the time of the Falklands War, enlivens the company by announcing: ‘I enjoy sex much more in my 50s than in my 40s.’
Perhaps this, then, is how she should be recognised, as a towering show- off and attention-seeker. As well as someone with a fear of losing her allure and an obsession with money — although thanks to the staggering indiscretions in her diary, she will now be having it delivered by the sackful.
Financial reward may, however, be the one compensation for putting pen to paper. Friendships have been broken and bridges burned on such an epic scale that all those glossy invitations to the smartest house parties are likely to vanish.
As one Tory grandee who entertained Sasha and her husband, former MP Sir Hugo Swire, at his country home said: ‘When she came to stay we had no idea she was keeping copious notes so we could appear in her diaries. They are a lovely couple but Sasha has a ruthless streak in her.’
Another ‘victim’, a former Cabinet minister with whom she used to exchange intimacies, recalled how in recent years, whenever she saw Sasha, she was bombarded with questions about her sex life. ‘I now think she was looking for nuggets for her bloody book,’ she says.
‘I feel very used. She goes out of her way to get you to open up emotionally. And I know others feel the same way.’
One figure says he and his wife came to dread going to dinner with the Swires. ‘The first thing she’ll say is, “Do you still sleep with your wife?” It’s so disarming.
‘She seeks to be friendly but it’s actually humiliating and it comes across as sheer bloody rudeness.’
FOR ten years at the epicentre of a social salon at the top of the political tree, Sasha Swire had a ringside seat in the management of Britain thanks to her husband’s friendship and support of David Cameron.
And all that time she was scratching away in the room at her Devon manor house she calls her ‘ writing tower’, overlooking the landscaped gardens she designed herself.
Her name is on the book and the words are certainly hers, but it has been a joint enterprise. Sir Hugo, a former debs’ delight who once dated Jerry Hall (when the Texan model was on the rebound from serially unfaithful Mick Jagger), was no mere passive observer.
It must, therefore, have been that much harder to include — amid all the lewd banter, cruel mockery, Negronis at dawn and withering put-downs — a reference to a suspected affair between her husband and an unnamed woman.
As the Mail reported yesterday, this was one social indiscretion Lady Swire was reluctant to enlarge upon.
Many wonder if this book will be the equivalent of the Alan Clark diaries of the Thatcher and Major years of the Eighties and Nineties? Clark, of course, found himself an object of contempt and derision over his sordid, and to many people, repulsive revelations about his sexual depravity.
Lady Swire’s wicked disclosures are, so far, only registering shock and dismay but the final judgment could yet be merciless. All the same, the Clark parallel does resonate. There is nothing in her memoir to match the grubbiness of Clark’s ‘coven’ — a mother and her two daughters with whom he slept. But some will see in this undoubtedly gripping diary an example of the seediness of life at the top of Britain.
And there is also the possibility that her diaries might one day be televised as Clark’s were. ‘She’s imagining a little mini-series,’ says a Devon friend.
Such chutzpah suggests that she feels she has done nothing to be ashamed of. ‘Yes, of course there were a few tears when the criticism began rolling in, but not for long and not very many,’ says a confidante. ‘ Sasha’s very pragmatic. She’s looked at what’s been said about the diaries and concluded that it’s mainly of a political nature.’
The journalist Petronella Wyatt, whose father Woodrow published a posthumous and outrageous account of private conversations with the great and the good, says Lady Swire — a friend of more than 20 years — had initially been upset at the reaction. ‘She doesn’t think the criticism is justified,’ adds Wyatt. ‘ It’s a fun book. It’s not nasty. No one should take offence.’
Others may disagree. Mr Cameron, for example, was left squirming over Lady Swire’s tales detailing his personal feuds, drinking and sexual innuendos.
Of the incident in which he allegedly joked that her perfume made him want to push her ‘into the bushes and give you one’, he prudently said he had no memory.
However, the former prime minister and his wife, Samantha, who in one passage is described as having ‘gin-sodden breath’ following her husband’s resignation after the EU referendum, are said to have been ‘astonished’ by the betrayal of so many friends and
confidences. They were aware that the diaries were coming. Others were not so fortunate.
At the same time it does seem extraordinary that the Camerons hosted the couple at their home in Cornwall for a weekend only a fortnight ago.
And that just last Saturday — 24 hours before the first instalment appeared in a Sunday newspaper and in which the exPM was said to have made smutty jokes about dogging and mocked for his fitness fads — he and Sir Hugo, 60, were shooting grouse together in Yorkshire with other senior Tories.
‘This actually tells you more about the Swires than the Camerons,’ says a figure. ‘Sasha is shameless and has this breathtaking confidence that Hugo is swept along by. It was the same when they met.’ Their meeting in 1996 had something of a coup de foudre about it says the friend. ‘Hugo had been a dashing army officer in the Grenadier Guards and was making his way at Sotheby’s and there were no shortage of girlfriends.’
At one stage he was a ‘walker’ for the separated Duchess of York. ‘Along came Sasha, this leggy blonde with a mind of her own and he was smitten.’
With Sasha pregnant with their first daughter — not a good look for a Tory seeking a parliamentary seat — they were married quickly.
ONLY five people were at the ceremony at the Royal Hospital chapel in Chelsea in 1996 where the best man was lord Michael Cecil, youngest brother of the Marquess of Salisbury.
A church service in Kensington was followed by a reception in the long Room at lord’s cricket ground. Among the guests were the Tory donor Anthony Bamford, owner of the JCB digger company and now a member of the House of lords.
The Swires’ daughter Saffron was born five months later and a second daughter, Siena, came along in 2001, shortly after Hugo’s election as MP for East Devon. (He had contested the hopeless labour seat of