Cameron ‘was chomping on cigars over endless bottles of wine’ after Brexit defeat
DAVID Cameron was ‘chomping on cigars’ over ‘endless bottles of wine’ the weekend after the Brexit vote, claims a former minister’s wife.
Sasha Swire also alleges that Mr Cameron’s wife Samantha was only able to join him for his resignation speech after a large negroni cocktail.
She makes the claims in her forthcoming bombshell book about her life as the wife of former Foreign Office minister Sir Hugo Swire.
In the latest extracts Lady Swire, 57, recalls visiting Mr and Mrs Cameron at their Oxfordshire home the weekend after the EU referendum in June 2016.
She says her husband had texted Mr Cameron to say ‘we are around if he wants cheering up’ and he texted back asking them to come ‘with two fat Cohibas and plenty of booze’. Cohiba is a premium brand of Cuban cigar.
Lady Swire says Mrs Cameron told her she did not think she could join her husband for his resignation speech – made in Downing Street at about 8am, hours after the result was announced – ‘without drinking a large negroni’.
She adds: ‘When they walked back inside, Dave apparently recoiled from her gin-sodden breath.’
When the Swires arrived at the Camerons’ Oxfordshire home, Mr Cameron was not there but his wife was and she was ‘devastated – not by Dave’s departure, but by the “stupid” decision the country has made’, Lady Swire claims.
‘When Dave arrives, he makes a lethal negroni before we progress to endless bottles of wine, whisky and brandy,’ she writes in the book, the latest extracts of which were published in The Times yesterday.
Mr Cameron, who resigned as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party after Britain voted to leave the EU in the referendum, was ‘incandescent with anger’. It was ‘almost wholly’ directed against his Cabinet colleague Michael Gove, who had jointly led the Vote Leave campaign with Boris Johnson.
‘As for Boris, he says that this whole episode was to do with his leadership ambitions and that he despised his lack of ideology, which is a tad ironic,’ Lady Swire says. ‘David tells us that even when he switched sides, Boris was telling him via texts that Brexit “would be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow” and that he (David) would survive.’ Lady Swire adds how after dinner Mrs Cameron ‘conks out on the sofa’ while Mr Cameron and her husband, whom she refers to as H, ‘are now chomping on cigars’.
In an entry the following year, Lady Swire says Mr Cameron is by then billed as ‘one of the most prominent global influencers of the early 21st century’ by the Washington Speakers Bureau. But she says ‘below the bravado’ she feels there is a ‘residue of sadness’.
Lady Swire’s book, Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power, is due out on Thursday next week. A spokesman for Mr Cameron said yesterday: ‘We are not commenting on the book.’