On the eve of election day Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist and usually partisan wife to Tory chief whip Michael Gove, has taken a break from Labour bashing to take the piss out of the whole government.
Among a set of bullet points (which could have been labelled “nine things only a Tory minister’s wife will understand”) are gems such as:
- All mugs in cabinet are numbered to stop ministers pinching them.
- Those in cabinet crave a ministerial red box not for the prestige, but for the access to chauffeur-driven travel it confers.
- The House of Commons is “essentially modelled on a boarding school system, which is why men who were torn away from the tender age of seven tend to thrive”.
- The impact of a ministerial brief on waistlines means “we are basically governed by a group of mildly overweight pub bores”.
Monkey notes that since moving from the education secretary post Gove will have been deprived of his red box and presumably thus his car, and is also one of the few Conservative members of the cabinet not to start his education at a prominent public school.
However, Monkey wouldn’t dream of speculating about whether Gove pilfers colleagues’ favourite tea receptacles, or if Vine would rather her husband spent a little less time in cabinet and more time on the treadmill.
