Maybe I’ve been naive, says Sasha as fury rises
THE wife of former Minister Hugo Swire has admitted that she may have been naive in the way she wrote her explosive political diary and claims she is ‘terrified of causing trouble’ with her revelations.
Sasha Swire finds herself at the centre of a storm with her tell-all book, Diary Of An MP’s Wife, a no-holds-barred account of the David Cameron years in power.
She tells The Observer newspaper: ‘Maybe I was naive. But I’m terrified of causing trouble. People are going to make this all about David; they won’t see the integrity of the diary as a whole.’
But she also pours oil on the fire, dismissing politics as ‘totally amateur’ and adding: ‘That’s why it’s so sexy and so toxic, and I’m so happy I’m not in it any more.’
In the style of the book, she adds that Theresa May ‘didn’t have an original idea in her head. And no friends, either.’ And she suggests Dominic Cummings will not last long in Downing Street, declaring: ‘It will all go t*** up with him, it always does. He’ll explode.’
Lady Swire’s comments come after furious Tory activists in her husband’s former constituency, accused her of ‘betraying’ friends with her indiscreet memoir.
In the book she describes Mr Cameron as ‘drunken Dave’ with a filthy mouth, Boris Johnson as ‘calculating’ and Mrs May as a ‘glumbucket’.
Lady Swire, 57, sent her diaries to a publisher last year after her husband retired as East Devon MP.
Last night Maddy Chapman, a Conservative district councillor there for 12 years, said local party members were ‘absolutely disgusted’ at the way she had breached the confidence of friends.
‘She has shown herself for what she is,’ said Mrs Chapman. ‘She has absolutely no class whatsoever. This has not gone down at all well in the constituency. Everyone I speak to is less than impressed and some, including myself, are absolutely disgusted.
‘Sasha Swire has never mixed within the local community, not even within our local party.
‘I suspect a lot of people will be crossing the Swires off their Christmas card list.’
In Lady Swire’s tell-all memoir, she reveals how David and Samantha Cameron drowned their sorrows following the Brexit vote.
She tells how, in the wake of the 2016 referendum, she visited the Camerons for a weekend at their Oxfordshire home.
She claims that the then-Prime Minister asked her husband to bring ‘two fat Cohibas [Cuban cigars] and plenty of booze’ and was ‘chomping on cigars’ over ‘endless bottles of wine’.
And she adds that Mrs Cameron had to muster up some Dutch courage before joining her husband for his resignation speech, feeling unable to do so ‘without drinking a large negroni’.
Of Boris Johnson, she is withering, writing: ‘It scares the s*** out of me that people don’t see [Mr Johnson] as the calculating machine he really is,’ and she describes Mr Johnson’s fiancee Carrie Symonds as his ‘hot young vixen’.
She has nicknames for many senior Tories. Former Prime Minister Theresa May is ‘Old Ma May’, George Osborne is ‘Boy George’ while Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is ‘Raab C Brexit’.
Mr Cameron has admitted the diaries, due out next week, were ‘kind of embarrassing’.