SamCam’s sister blasts ‘frustrated housewife’ Sasha
SAMANTHA Cameron has maintained a dignified silence since Sasha Swire spilled the most intimate secrets about their friendship. But now her sister, Emily Sheffield, has hit back in the most personal fashion.
Emily has dismissed Sasha as a ‘ frustrated housewife’ and suggested she wrote the tellall book because she was bitter at not being mentioned in memoirs published by major political figures such as Emily’s brother-in-law, David Cameron.
‘You sort of wonder why she did it, but she was always a bit of a frustrated housewife, which, actually, is sad for women,’ declares baronet’s daughter Emily, who succeeded George Osborne as editor of the London Evening Standard.
‘If you’re feeling frustrated, you should go out and do something, and this is what she did. But do you have to write about your close friends to get you notoriety? In her acknowledgements, she says thanks to all the Cameroons for barely mentioning me in their memoirs. This is payback.’
Sasha’s husband, Sir Hugo Swire, is an old friend of his fellow Old Etonian David Cameron and was given a job as a Northern Ireland minister. But that didn’t stop his former journalist wife disclosing the most embarrassing details of their friendship in Diary Of An MP’s Wife. For example, that Cameron had told her to go behind him on a coastal walk because ‘the scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones — it makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one’. The Swires were staying at the Camerons’ holiday home in Cornwall at the time.
Speaking on The Spectator’s Women With Balls podcast, Emily declares: ‘I was definitely shocked when I read it and the level of detail she had put in because it felt unnecessary. If you’re having dinner with a great friend, and they’re on your holiday, the fact they’re going up every night to write everything down is kind of weird.’
Samantha is, however, determined to rise above it. ‘I spoke to my sister last night,’ Emily says. ‘ She’s not losing any sleep over it.’
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