Diary of an MP’S Wife, by Sasha Swire

Diary of an MP’S Wife

By Sasha Swire

Little, Brown £20

The plain, self-effacing title of this book contains its secret and its joke. The wife who was treated as a nobody turns out to be a deadly double agent.

In a moment of dramatic irony, David Cameron signs a copy of his own dull old work of statesmanship to Sasha with thanks for ‘love and support’. She accepts this warmly, while writing, ‘Of course, unless he is prepared to settle scores and wash his dirty linen in public, it won’t exactly fly off the shelves and I doubt he will do that as he is too much of a gent.’

The secondary joke is that it is not really the diary of an MP’S wife. It is a joint enterprise. Sasha Swire is mostly reliant on second-hand anecdotes from her husband, the former Tory minister Hugo Swire, and his own rather selfsatisfied quips and observations are polished like brass.

Sasha’s diaries have been treated by the Cameroons as the worst betrayal since Kim Philby. One acquaintance pointed out to me that Sasha’s mother was Slovenian – AS IS MELANIA TRUMP – and there is an East European deadliness born of an eyeing up of Russia. Slav blood. It is a thrilling notion that Melania could also be keeping a diary…

Sasha and Hugo infiltrated the innermost sanctuary of the Cameron mateocracy – so what is the calibre of the secrets they have betrayed? There is nothing to worry the intelligence services, but plenty to interest Netflix.

There has been an understandable closing of ranks. The responses range from lofty dismissal of the Swires (‘We barely knew them’) to wounded gravitas (‘They did not see or describe the seriousness of government’) and the revelation that Hugo Swire was allegedly unfaithful to his wife.

Funnily enough, in the book this exposé tactic is associated with the May regime, who tried to take down Boris by revealing his affair with Carrie Symonds. It did not stop Boris Johnson and, in a different way, I do not think it will stop Sasha Swire, who has many more unpublished diaries still to come.

Her first volume is socially contemptible – and it’s also selling out. It is a twist that her agent, Caroline

Dawnay, is related to the Johnsons. The mateocracy turns out to be full of cracks. Treachery is everywhere. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson betray David Cameron, and Cameron responds by saying the Gove family is no longer welcome in his house. It is personal.

Cameron once said in print that a consequence of power was that he stuck to old friends for safety’s sake.

This is how Sasha Swire describes in the book that circling of the social wagons:

‘The closeness of this circle is unprecedented. They are all here; the ones that eat, drink, party together, they are all intimately interlocked some from university days, some from the research unit, some later. We all holiday together, stay in each other’s grace-and-favour homes; our children play together, we text each other bypassing the civil servants… This is a very particular narrow tribe of Britain.’

Never mind Kim Philby; this is Iago. A trusted confidante harbours a grudge.

This makes Diary of an MP’S Wife both compelling and shrewd. Of course, it is not how the protagonists would wish to see themselves portrayed. But there is, in its odd, crass way, a ring of truth about the book. There is no particular self-awareness about any of them but they reveal themselves by what they say.

The character of the narrator is also undisguised. Sasha is seeking something – perhaps status – and goes about it by being consistently rude to everyone in a flirtatious, devil-may-care manner. Sometime she launches into policy tirades about Syria or Brexit, which must have been more tiresome.

David Cameron is the central character of the diaries, since they cover his time in power and because Hugo Swire is a friend whom he unaccountably promotes and protects. Cameron is sensitive about the charge that his was a government of Old Etonians, because that was his Achilles heel. He was comfortable among Old Etonians.

He could be himself among them, not having to pretend to be interested in football, able to make off-colour jokes about fanciable women and the size of Michael Gove’s member, enjoying his grasp of the class and wealth distinctions of the Swires, and able to chillax in the middle of a crisis. This was his political weakness, and Cameron has described the diaries as ‘mildly embarrassing’.

I reckon that mildly embarrassing is a good description. Cameron also comes across as a decent and loving husband and an extremely capable Prime