MP’s wife striking fear into top Tories
Carrie Symonds is a ‘vixen’ and Cameron ‘made dogging jokes’
CONSERVATIVE MPs were preparing themselves last night for embarrassing revelations from the diary of an ex-minister’s wife.
Sasha Swire’s candid journal about her life as wife of former Foreign Office minister Sir Hugo Swire is due to be published next week.
In it, she calls Boris Johnson as a ‘calculating machine’, his partner Carrie Symonds a ‘hot young vixen’ and tells how her young daughter almost derailed the Queen’s visit to Northern Ireland.
Theresa May is described as ‘Old Ma May’, while George Osborne becomes ‘Boy George’ and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is dubbed ‘Raab C Brexit’ after the comic TV character Rab C Nesbitt.
Lady Swire, 57, details the gossip and political machinations of life in David Cameron’s coalition government, when her husband was a minister for Northern Ireland.
She describes MPs as ‘show ponies’ and rows between chancellor Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron’s deputy Nick Clegg over who should live at Dorneywood, a grace-andfavour country home in Buckinghamshire.
In extracts published in The Sunday Times, the former journalist detailed a dinner with Boris Johnson after he
‘Boris came across as desperately lonely’
became Prime Minister, writing: ‘For all his hinterland and hot young vixen, Boris just came across as someone who is desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside.’
She also tells of a party held by Samantha Cameron, who allegedly left Michael Gove’s wife, Mail columnist Sarah Vine, to prepare the food while she had her hair styled, describing her ‘turning up... feeling perfectly relaxed while Sarah is laden with dishes of fish pie she has herself cooked’.
Lady Swire, daughter of former defence secretary Sir John Nott, sent her diaries to a publisher last year after her husband retired as MP for East Devon. She said she didn’t tell him about her plans, and had not contacted any of his former colleagues to request permission to include them.
The book, Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power, which is due to be published on September 24, prompted a bidding war.
In yesterday’s extracts, she described David Cameron forcing her reluctant husband to go for a run with him in Devon. She said he told the prime minister’s ‘flunkies’ the route passed a dogging spot. The diary adds: ‘Of course, no one is more amused by it than the prime minister himself, who starts to make lots of dogging jokes.’
She also tells how the Queen’s visit to Hillsborough almost had to be stopped after her daughter Siena, then nine, wrote down the security details and left her notebook in a restaurant, adding: ‘A rolling pandemonium ensues... a phalanx of policemen moves like a tide into the restaurant... “Got it!” says one.’